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COSMOLOGY : OLD AND NEW
the original difficulty will now be associated with this new medium and so on. Hence the only reasonable solution is to regard dharma and adharma as wholly continuous non-material media mutually interpenetrating like the electrostatic, magnetostatic and gravitational fields, which, although they are of different character do not mix; each preserves its individuality regardless of the other.21 Many instances may be quoted even in the case of material substances where imagination has to put up with apparently glaring contradictions. Imagination is not always the test of possibility.
For instance, the law of gravitation for material bodies as quoted on pages 26-27 ante is that every piece of matter attracts any other piece, but this law does not hold when the distance between the particles becomes very very small. The attraction changes into a repulsion. We quote from a standard book recently published: “Since two different atoms cannot be absolutely superposed on one another, it would seem that a repulsive force must come into play between two atoms when the distance is of the order 10 cm., and that Newton's law then ceases to hold."212
Is this not an apparent contradiction difficult for the mind to grasp ? Why should the force of attraction between particles change into a force of repulsion at small distances? Even in ordinary life we see that the repulsive force which keeps the wife away from the husband changes into an attractive force and the wife does not want to be separated from her husband beyond a certain distance.
A similar point has been discussed on page 13 ante, wherein the leading physicist Dr. M.N. Saha, F.R.S., says, “It is not at all clear how stripped atoms with a large excess of positive electricity can be so closely packed; because as the charges are of the same sign, the tendency would be for infinite dispersion instead of abnormal condensation. But such cases of abnormal condensation are not altogether unknown in physics."
Hale in 1918 demonstrated beyond doubt that the sun-spots had an intense magnetic field of about 50,000 gauss, which is further confirmed by the phenomenon of Zeeman effect. But this is quite unbelievable in the light of the experiments carried on the surface of the earth. The temperature of the sun-spots
211. See The Evolution of Physics by Einstein and Infeld, p. 141. 212. Properties of Matter by Champion and Davy. (1936).
