134 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



moving?" for this question involves no radical innova- 

 tion which might in the end spell disaster to their 

 cherished prejudices. It seems self-evident enough to me 

 that the Newtonians, in denying the causation of the 

 sun's motion, and in asserting, with ever increasing as- 

 surance and solemnity, that his course through the ether 

 is unique, random, and uncontrolled by any organic uni- 

 fying law, are guilty of a grave folly and are needlessly 

 renouncing in advance the choice fruits of their arduous 

 labors. The only conceivable value the knowledge of the 

 sun's course and velocity can have to science and human- 

 ity, lies in its possible far-reaching correlations, in its 

 constructive potentialities. A sun moving, as they as- 

 sert, randomly, unimpelled, and undirected, can have, 

 per se, no correlations and no structural significance 

 whatsoever. 



For all that, the practical astronomers, fired by the 

 passion for physical accuracy for its own sake, are every 

 day planning on an ever more and more ambitious scale 

 to go over the same ground again and again, without any 

 definite object in mind, it seems, save to see how near they 

 may come to the previous marks. There is no way to 

 test their accuracy, so far as they are aware, by final ar- 

 bitrament of Nature, but only by indecisive comparison 

 of their own results with those previously announced. 

 In any case, all their labor goes for naught as long as 

 their architects, the theorists, neglect and refuse to re- 

 form their ground plans so as to give structural place to 

 the plethora of facts (never anticipated by the original 

 architect, Newton) now promisculously encumbering the 

 ground. Whatever incentives one may have to remain- 

 ing unpersuaded, it must be patent to all that a radical 

 reformation of astronomical theory has become impera- 

 tive. What more likely way, I ask, than by giving to the 

 phrase "UNIVERSAL gravitation" its plenary significance 

 and genuinely universal applications ? 



The principle of the gyroscope is too well recognized 

 to require extended discussion in this place. Eotation in 

 one direction around an axis, under the law of action and 

 reaction, must, and as a matter of everyday mechanics 



