Pioneers of science / [Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge].

  • Oliver Lodge
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Pioneers of science / [Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    39^ Pioneers of Science lect. begin to diminish; then increase again, then diminish, and so on. The system was stable, and its changes were merely like those of a swinging pendulum. But this conclusion is not final. The ‘hypothesis that the bodies are rigid is not strictly true: and directly tidal deformation is taken into consideration it is perceived to be a potent factor, able in the long run to upset all their calculations. But it is so utterly and inconceivably minute —it only produces an appreciable effect after millions of years—whereas the ordinary perturbations go through their swings in some hundred thousand years or so at the most. Granted it is small, but it is terribly persistent; and it always acts in one direction. Never does it cease: never does it begin to act oppositely and undo what it has done. It is like the perpetual dropping of water. There may be only one drop in a twelvemonth, but leave it long enough, and the hardest stone must be worn away at last. We have been speaking of millions of years somewhat familiarly ; but what, after all, is a million years that we should not speak familiarly of it? It is longer than our lifetime, it is true. To the ephemeral insects whose life-time is an horn', a year might seem an awful period, the mid-day sun might seem an almost stationary body, the changes of the seasons would be unknown, everything but the most fleet- ing and rapid changes would appear permanent and at rest. Conversely, if our life-period embraced myriads of aeons, things which now seem permanent would then appear as in a perpetual state of flux. A continent would be sometimes dry, sometimes covered with ocean; the stars we now call fixed would be moving visibly before our eyes; the earth would be humming on its axis like a top, and the whole of human history might seem as fleeting as a cloud of breath on a mirror.