Cosmology Old and New

Author(s): G R Jain
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 50

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COSMOLOGY OLD AND NEW
kind. One and the same body has motion or rest; it may move or it may come to stay. Therefore dharma and adharma must be deprived of their causality. They can only be bahirangahetu or udasina-hetu, i.e. they must be indifferent and neutral in themselves and yet must be indispensable to the composition of the world.
This seems to be the logical development of the system. The most approximate modern conception answering to the description will be Ether of the physicist. But the Jaina systems require two such entities functionally different; one acting like Newton's gravitation (adharma) and the other guaranteeing motion within the limits. It would not be quite accurate to think of centripetal or centrifugal forces, because dharma and adharma are niskriyas. Does it mean the duality of electromagnetic influence of Ether? The constitution of an atom is supposed to be a system of electrons (positive and negative). 51 Had the Jaina thinkers any such idea about the whole world? We can only contemplate. But of this much we are certain that dharma and adharma are parts of the physical system. They are two different entities without which the System of reality would be impossible and incomplete".
Let us see what has a physicist to say about his aether.
In a popular scientific work An Outline for Boys and Girls. and Their parents we find the following:
"The first problem was, of course, that if light waves were real waves, they must be waves in something. They were plainly not waves in matter; it was necessary therefore to invent something else, which was not matter, for them to be waves in. This something they called the 'ether', and imagined it as an utterly thin and utterly elastic fluid, that flowed undisturbed between the particles of the material universe and filled all 'empty space' of every kind.
What was this ether like?52 Difficulties and contradictions
straight line, except in so far as it may be compelled to change that by impressed forces."
"Material frictions and reactions are visible as absolute interferences which can change the motion of a body."
(The nature of the Physical World, by Eddington.) 51. This slightly erroneous, positive electron is not the proton. Proton is 2.000 times heavier than the positive electron discovered in 1932.
52. Material media are penetrated by ether, their molecules being surrounded by it much as the leaves of a tree are surrounded by air.