United States or Hong Kong ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For a moment he actually hated this vulgar treasure that had forever buried under its gross ponderability the light and careless past, and utterly crushed out the poetry of their old, indolent, happy existence. He was sure to find them waiting at the Cross Roads where the coach came past. It was three miles away, yet he could get there in time if he hastened.
The striking success of the hypothesis of the ether in optics has, in our own days, strengthened the hope of being able to explain, by an analogous representation, the action of gravitation. For a long time, philosophers who rejected the idea that ponderability is a primary and essential quality of all bodies have sought to reduce their weight to pressures exercised in a very subtle fluid.
Let us suppose that he succeeds in demonstrating that the intensity of gravity is less for radium than for the platinum or the copper of which the pendulums used to illustrate the law of Newton are generally made; it would then be possible still to think that the laws of universal attraction are perfectly exact as regards the stars, and that ponderability is really a particular case of universal attraction, while in the case of radioactive bodies part of the gravitational energy is transformed in the course of its evolution and appears in the form of active radiation.
For a moment he actually hated this vulgar treasure that had forever buried under its gross ponderability the light and careless past, and utterly crushed out the poetry of their old, indolent, happy existence. He was sure to find them waiting at the Cross Roads where the coach came past. It was three miles away, yet he could get there in time if he hastened.
Save for some such old associations as these, why should it be supposed that matter becomes "spriritualized" as it diminishes in apparent substantiality? Why should matter be pronounced respectable in the inverse ratio of its density or ponderability? Why is a diamond any more chargeable with "grossness" than a cubic centimetre of hydrogen?
We, on the contrary, are led to recognize in heat a fourth condition into which matter may pass on leaving the three ponderable conditions, and out of which it may emerge on the way to ponderability. Before showing that such transitions are actually known in nature, it may be well to discuss here an objection which the customary way of thinking might plausibly advance against our whole method.
Exposed to heat, however, physical substance loses this feature to the extent that at the border of its ponderability all matter becomes pervious to light. Now, in the transparent crystal matter retains this kinship to light even in its solid state. A similar message comes from the, often so mysterious, colouring of the crystals.
It is like saying money, after large and worthy expenditures, by purchasing at a low price that which is worth nothing, buying "gold" watches at a mock-auction room. Indeed, no book, however witty, lively, saltatory, can have the volant effects we covet, if it want substance and seriousness. Substance, however, is to be widely distinguished from ponderability.
Here also are found the insignificant lightness of the pebble and the mighty lightness of the planet; while between them range the weighty masses, superior to the petty ponderability of the one, and unequal to the firmamental float of the other.
Far from being an accumulation of ponderable matter in a state of extremely high temperature, as science supposes, the sun represents the very opposite of ponderability. Once we realize this, our judgment of all that our terrestrially devised optical instruments, such as the telescope and spectroscope, tell us about the nature of the sun and its surroundings, will change accordingly.