第36章 ISAAC NEWTON.(6)

It then occurred to Newton, that though the moon is at a distance of two hundred and forty thousand miles from the earth, yet the attractive power of the earth must extend to the moon. He was particularly led to think of the moon in this connection, not only because the moon is so much closer to the earth than are any other celestial bodies, but also because the moon is an appendage to the earth, always revolving around it. The moon is certainly attracted to the earth, and yet the moon does not fall down; how is this to be accounted for? The explanation was to be found in the character of the moon's present motion. If the moon were left for a moment at rest, there can be no doubt that the attraction of the earth would begin to draw the lunar globe in towards our globe. In the course of a few days our satellite would come down on the earth with a most fearful crash. This catastrophe is averted by the circumstance that the moon has a movement of revolution around the earth. Newton was able to calculate from the known laws of mechanics, which he had himself been mainly instrumental in discovering, what the attractive power of the earth must be, so that the moon shall move precisely as we find it to move. It then appeared that the very power which makes an apple fall at the earth's surface is the power which guides the moon in its orbit.

[PLATE: SIR ISAAC NEWTON'S TELESCOPE.]

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It was at this point that the great laws of Kepler became especially significant. Kepler had shown how each of the planets revolves in an ellipse around the sun, which is situated on one of the foci. This discovery had been arrived at from the interpretation of observations. Kepler had himself assigned no reason why the orbit of a planet should be an ellipse rather than any other of the infinite number of closed curves which might be traced around the sun. Kepler had also shown, and here again he was merely deducing the results from observation, that when the movements of two planets were compared together, the squares of the periodic times in which each planet revolved were proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun. This also Kepler merely knew to be true as a fact, he gave no demonstration of the reason why nature should have adopted this particular relation between the distance and the periodic time rather than any other. Then, too, there was the law by which Kepler with unparalleled ingenuity, explained the way in which the velocity of a planet varies at the different points of its track, when he showed how the line drawn from the sun to the planet described equal areas around the sun in equal times. These were the materials with which Newton set to work. He proposed to infer from these the actual laws regulating the force by which the sun guides the planets. Here it was that his sublime mathematical genius came into play. Step by step Newton advanced until he had completely accounted for all the phenomena.

In the first place, he showed that as the planet describes equal areas in equal times about the sun, the attractive force which the sun exerts upon it must necessarily be directed in a straight line towards the sun itself. He also demonstrated the converse truth, that whatever be the nature of the force which emanated from a sun, yet so long as that force was directed through the sun's centre, any body which revolved around it must describe equal areas in equal times, and this it must do, whatever be the actual character of the law according to which the intensity of the force varies at different parts of the planet's journey. Thus the first advance was taken in the exposition of the scheme of the universe.

The next step was to determine the law according to which the force thus proved to reside in the sun varied with the distance of the planet. Newton presently showed by a most superb effort of mathematical reasoning, that if the orbit of a planet were an ellipse and if the sun were at one of the foci of that ellipse, the intensity of the attractive force must vary inversely as the square of the planet's distance. If the law had any other expression than the inverse square of the distance, then the orbit which the planet must follow would not be an ellipse; or if an ellipse, it would, at all events, not have the sun in the focus. Hence he was able to show from Kepler's laws alone that the force which guided the planets was an attractive power emanating from the sun, and that the intensity of this attractive power varied with the inverse square of the distance between the two bodies.

These circumstances being known, it was then easy to show that the last of Kepler's three laws must necessarily follow. If a number of planets were revolving around the sun, then supposing the materials of all these bodies were equally affected by gravitation, it can be demonstrated that the square of the periodic time in which each planet completes its orbit is proportional to the cube of the greatest diameter in that orbit.

[PLATE: SIR ISAAC NEWTON'S ASTROLABE.]