Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Machinery of the Universe: Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena
    The Machinery of the Universe: Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena
    The Machinery of the Universe: Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    The Machinery of the Universe: Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena

    By A. E. Dolbear

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Machinery of the Universe: Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena" by A. E. Dolbear. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigiCat
    Release dateAug 1, 2022
    ISBN8596547123491
    The Machinery of the Universe: Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena

    Related to The Machinery of the Universe

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Infinite Energy

      Apr 19, 2021

      Infinite Energy
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble with Theories of Everything: There is no known physics theory that is true at every scale—there may never be.

      Oct 1, 2015

      Whenever you say anything about your daily life, a scale is implied. Try it out. “I’m too busy” only works for an assumed time scale: today, for example, or this week. Not this century or this nanosecond. “Taxes are onerous” only makes sense for a ce

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Joy of Condensed Matter: Hard times in fundamental physics got you down? Let’s talk excitons.

      Dec 31, 2021

      Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Wonder” issue in February, 2021. Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Joy of Condensed Matter

      Feb 24, 2021

      Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, and Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math leap to mind, and they have started a wider conversation. But is all of phys

      7 min read

    • Article

      Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark: In unseen worlds, science invariably crosses paths with fantasy.

      Mar 6, 2014

      For centuries, scientists studied light to comprehend the visible world. Why are things colored? What is a rainbow? How do our eyes work? And what is light itself? These are questions that preoccupied scientists and philosophers since the time of Ari

      15 min read

    • Article

      Time Flows Toward Order

      Dec 2, 2020

      The one law of physics that virtually all scientists believe will never be found to be wrong is the second law of thermodynamics. Despite this exalted status, it has long been associated with a great mystery and a bleak implication. The mystery is th

      9 min read

    • Article

      How Physics Is Like Three-Chord Rock: Like a set of common chords, the same math appears in diverse fields of physics.

      Jun 12, 2014

      A few years back, 12 million of us clicked over to watch the “Pachelbel Rant” on YouTube. You might remember it. Strumming repetitive chords on his guitar, comedian Rob Paravonian confessed that when he was a cellist, he couldn’t stand the Pachelbel

      6 min read

    • Article

      Why Science Should Stay Clear of Metaphysics: Meet the philosopher who revived anti-realism.

      Sep 8, 2016

      Philosophers of science are not known for agreeing with each other—contrariness is part of the job description. But for thousands of years, from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn, those who study what science is have roughly categorized themselves into two ba

      11 min read

    • Article

      Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious

      Dec 30, 2020

      Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our Facts So Romantic blog in May, 2020. In May, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and ph

      5 min read

    • Article

      If Not Darwin, Who?: An alternative history of the great ideas of science.

      Dec 15, 2016

      What would physics look like if Einstein had never existed, or biology without Darwin? In one view, nothing much would change—the discoveries they made and theories they devised would have materialized anyway sooner or later. That’s the odd thing abo

      13 min read

    • Article

      Our Little Life Is Rounded with Possibility

      Jun 9, 2021

      If you could soar high in the sky, as red kites often do in search of prey, and look down at the domain of all things known and yet to be known, you would see something very curious: a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely negl

      10 min read

    • Article

      When Words Are Not Enough

      Sep 1, 2021

      When Words Are Not Enough
      12 min read

    • Article

      Our Little Life Is Rounded with Possibility: Science expressed only in terms of what happens is getting in the way of progress.

      Dec 31, 2021

      Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Hidden Truths” issue in June, 2021. If you could soar high in the sky, as red kites often do in search of prey, and l

      10 min read

    • Article

      Faraday And Antigravity

      Sep 8, 2022

      SEND FORUM SUBMISSIONS TO THE EDITOR: DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM The “Priest of Truth”–that’s how Punch magazine described Michael Faraday, in a poetic tribute printed after his death in 1867. The poem recounts how, through Faraday’s scientific insigh

      6 min read

    • Article

      Critical Thinker

      Apr 16, 2023

      ANAXIMANDER AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE, by Carlo Rovelli (Allen Lane, $40) Most scientists know what science is until someone asks them to define it, and then they don’t. It’s something to do with precision and accuracy, so you’d think there was a pre

      3 min read

    • Article

      Paradox Is Illuminating the Black Hole

      Jan 31, 2019

      An Introduction to the Black Hole Institute Fittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equations for general relativity—a solution that described a black hole decades before the first a

      7 min read

    • Article

      Why Physics Can’t Tell Us What Life Is

      Oct 21, 2020

      There is just something obviously reasonable about the following notion: If all life is built from atoms that obey precise equations we know—which seems to be true—then the existence of life might just be some downstream consequence of these laws tha

      11 min read

    • Article

      We Have to Talk About Doubt: How to tell the difference between scientific and conspiratorial skepticism.

      Sep 1, 2021

      What is the role of reasonable doubt in advancing science? And how should we contrast scientific doubt with the cavilling doubt of conspiracy theories which play little part in advancing understanding? Over the last year we have seen the scientific m

      5 min read

    • Article

      Quark Of Habit

      Dec 1, 2022

      A round 400 BC, the Greek philosopher Democritus proffered the idea that all matter was composed of indivisible, featureless constituents. He described them using the Greek word for “uncuttable”: atomos. Two thousand years later, scientists found tha

      4 min read

    • Article

      What Particle Physics Can Teach Us About Hope

      May 16, 2022

      Ernest Rutherford – the ‘father of nuclear physics’ – was a tall, bolshie New Zealander with a voice so loud that he’d disrupt electrical equipment in the lab in Cambridge. His students and staff were famous for concocting physics experiments out of

      3 min read

    • Article

      Ghosts In The Machine

      Mar 11, 2020

      Ghosts In The Machine
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Machinery of the Universe

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Machinery of the Universe - A. E. Dolbear

      A. E. Dolbear

      The Machinery of the Universe: Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena

      EAN 8596547123491

      DigiCat, 2022

      Contact: DigiCat@okpublishing.info

      Table of Contents

      PREFACE

      CHAPTER I

      CHAPTER II

      PROPERTIES OF MATTER AND ETHER

      1. MATTER IS DISCONTINUOUS.

      THE ETHER IS CONTINUOUS.

      2. MATTER IS LIMITED.

      THE ETHER IS UNLIMITED.

      3. MATTER IS HETEROGENEOUS.

      THE ETHER IS HOMOGENEOUS.

      4. MATTER IS ATOMIC.

      THE ETHER IS NON-ATOMIC.

      5. MATTER HAS DEFINITE STRUCTURE.

      THE ETHER IS STRUCTURELESS.

      6. MATTER IS GRAVITATIVE.

      THE ETHER IS GRAVITATIONLESS.

      7. MATTER IS FRICTIONABLE.

      THE ETHER IS FRICTIONLESS.

      8. MATTER IS ÆOLOTROPIC.

      THE ETHER IS ISOTROPIC.

      9. MATTER IS CHEMICALLY SELECTIVE.

      10. THE ELEMENTS OF MATTER ARE HARMONICALLY RELATED.

      11. MATTER EMBODIES ENERGY.

      THE ETHER IS ENDOWED WITH ENERGY.

      12. MATTER IS AN ENERGY TRANSFORMER.

      THE ETHER IS A NON-TRANSFORMER.

      13. MATTER IS ELASTIC.

      THE ETHER IS ELASTIC.

      14. MATTER HAS DENSITY.

      THE ETHER HAS DENSITY.

      15. MATTER IS HEATABLE.

      THE ETHER IS UNHEATABLE.

      16. MATTER IS INDESTRUCTIBLE.

      17. MATTER HAS INERTIA.

      THE ETHER IS CONDITIONALLY POSSESSED OF INERTIA.

      18. MATTER IS MAGNETIC.

      THE ETHER IS NON-MAGNETIC.

      19. MATTER EXISTS IN SEVERAL STATES.

      THE ETHER HAS NO CORRESPONDING STATES.

      20. SOLID MATTER CAN EXPERIENCE A SHEARING STRESS, LIQUIDS AND GASES CANNOT.

      THE ETHER CAN MAINTAIN A SHEARING STRESS.

      21. OTHER PROPERTIES OF MATTER.

      22. SENSATION DEPENDS UPON MATTER.

      THE ETHER IS INSENSIBLE TO NERVES.

      CONTRASTED PROPERTIES OF MATTER AND THE ETHER.

      CHAPTER III

      THE END

      PREFACE

      Table of Contents

      For thirty years or more the expressions Correlation of the Physical Forces and The Conservation of Energy have been common, yet few persons have taken the necessary pains to think out clearly what mechanical changes take place when one form of energy is transformed into another.

      Since Tyndall gave us his book called Heat as a Mode of Motion neither lecturers nor text-books have attempted to explain how all phenomena are the necessary outcome of the various forms of motion. In general, phenomena have been attributed to forces—a metaphysical term, which explains nothing and is merely a stop-gap, and is really not at all needful in these days, seeing that transformable modes of motion, easily perceived and understood, may be substituted in all cases for forces.

      In December 1895 the author gave a lecture before the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, on Mechanical Conceptions of Electrical Phenomena, in which he undertook to make clear what happens when electrical phenomena appear. The publication of this lecture in The Journal of the Franklin Institute and in Nature brought an urgent request that it should be enlarged somewhat and published in a form more convenient for the public. The enlargement consists in the addition of a chapter on the "Contrasted Properties of Matter and the Ether," a chapter containing something which the author believes to be of philosophical importance in these days when electricity is so generally described as a phenomenon of the ether.

      A. E. Dolbear.

      CHAPTER I

      Table of Contents

      Ideas of phenomena ancient and modern, metaphysical and mechanical—Imponderables—Forces, invented and discarded—Explanations—Energy, its factors, Kinetic and Potential—Motions, kinds and transformations of—Mechanical, molecular, and atomic—Invention of Ethers, Faraday's conceptions.

      ‘And now we might add something concerning a most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies, by the force and action of which spirit the particles of bodies attract each other at near distances, and cohere if contiguous, and electric bodies operate at greater distances, as well repelling as attracting neighbouring corpuscles, and light is emitted, reflected, inflected, and heats bodies, and all sensation is excited, and members of animal bodies move at the command of the will.’—

      Newton

      , Principia.

      In Newton's day the whole field of nature was practically lying fallow. No fundamental principles were known until the law of gravitation was discovered. This law was behind all the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and what they had done needed interpretation. It was quite natural that the most obvious and mechanical phenomena should first be reduced, and so the Principia was concerned with mechanical principles applied to astronomical problems. To us, who have grown up familiar with the principles and conceptions underlying them, all varieties of mechanical phenomena seem so obvious, that it is difficult for us to understand how any one could be obtuse to them; but the records of Newton's time, and immediately after this, show that they were not so easy of apprehension. It may be remembered that they were not adopted in France till long after Newton's day. In spite of what is thought to be reasonable, it really requires something more than complete demonstration to convince most of us of the truth of an idea, should the truth happen to be of a kind not familiar, or should it chance to be opposed to our more or less well-defined notions of what it is or ought to be. If those who labour for and attain what they think to be the truth about any matter, were a little better informed concerning mental processes and the conditions under which ideas grow and displace others, they would be more patient with mankind; teachers of every rank might then discover that what is often called stupidity may be nothing else than mental inertia, which can no more be made active by simply willing than can the movement of a cannon ball by a like effort. We grow into our beliefs and opinions upon all matters, and scientific ideas are no exceptions.

      Whewell, in his History of the Inductive Sciences, says that the Greeks made no headway in physical science because they lacked appropriate ideas. The evidence is overwhelming that they were as observing, as acute, as reasonable as any who live to-day. With this view, it would appear that the great discoverers must have been men who started out with appropriate ideas: were looking for what they found. If, then, one reflects upon the exceeding great difficulty there is in discovering one new truth, and the immense amount of work needed to disentangle it, it would appear as if even the most successful have but indistinct ideas of what is really appropriate, and that their mechanical conceptions become clarified by doing their work. This is not always the fact. In the statement of Newton quoted at the head of this chapter, he speaks of a spirit which lies hid in all gross bodies, etc., by means of which all kinds of phenomena are to be explained; but he deliberately abandons that idea when he comes to the study of light, for he assumes the existence and activity of light corpuscles, for which he has no experimental evidence; and the probability is that he did this because the latter conception was one which he could handle mathematically, while he saw no way for thus dealing with the other. His mechanical instincts were more to be trusted than his carefully calculated results; for, as all know, what he called spirits, is what to-day we call the ether, and the corpuscular theory of light has now no more than a historic interest. The corpuscular theory was a mechanical conception, but each such corpuscle was ideally endowed with qualities which were out of all relation with the ordinary matter with which it was classed.

      Until the middle of the present century the reigning physical philosophy held to the existence of what were called imponderables. The phenomena of heat were explained as due to an imponderable substance called caloric, which ordinary matter could absorb and emit. A hot body was one which had absorbed an imponderable

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1