98 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



sessing objective existence without substance ; that they 

 can change their courses and bear loads without loss of 

 momentum ; that they have fortuitously happened to ally 

 themselves to the same sun, to have hit upon approxi- 

 mately the same plane, to be traveling in the same direc- 

 tion, to have velocities bearing a fixed ratio to each other 

 and to their solar distances, and, finally, that after 

 hundreds of millions of years no accidents have happened 

 to any of them, by meteoric collisions or otherwise, to dis- 

 turb this precarious arrangement. It neglects to take 

 into account the factor of the stellar attractions, the sun's 

 movement in space, the age of the sun and earth, or the 

 rotation of nebulae. It does not clinch the law of gravita- 

 tion, or explain the moon's secular acceleration, or solve 

 the problem of the tides, or account for meteors, or ex- 

 plain the relationship between comets, asteroids, and 

 planets, or give the physical basis for the phenomenon of 

 conservation of moment of momentum. It harnesses bul- 

 lets with horses, and pits finite moments against creative 

 gravity. It pretends that an arc is as long as its tangent, 

 that the moon is falling to the earth's limb instead of to- 

 ward its center, that persistent is a synonym for inertial, 

 and that the whole minus an infinite number of times all 

 its parts is still equal to itself. 



Then why, you may ask, has the theory held sway so 

 long ! The answer is simple and lies in the nature of man 

 himself, who finds in faith of some kind intellectual as 

 well as religious repose. Just as many honest souls be- 

 lieve in this or that theological dogma under the mis- 

 taken conviction that denial thereof involves a denial of 

 the Christian's God, so do men believe in this inertial 

 theory under the hallucination that to deny it is to sacri- 

 fice the great cosmic principle of Gravitation itself. My 

 system calls for no such sacrifice. 



