Cosmology Old and New

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

Page 62

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COSMOLOGY OLD AND NEW
crumbles under the weight of a big doll. Certainly space and time must be distorted by gravitation." Why does an apple fall to the earth? The answer is the presence of the apple distorts the space in its neighbourhood and the apple then slips along the line of the greatest slope, not that it is pulled by the gravitational attraction of the earth.
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Nikhil Ranjan Sen, D.Sc. (Cal.), Ph.D. (Berlin), Professor of Applied Mathematics, Calcutta University, in his article on Relativity" writes as follows:
"Though the general theory of Relativity gives a conception of the Universe totally different from the one on which the classical mechanics of Newton and Galileo is based, the new theory succeeds in describing all physical phenomena in conformity with our experience quite as good as the classical theory. With Newton's mechanics gravitation is simply a question of attraction at a distance according to a definite law. How this mechanism of action at a distance operates, the theory is silent about the point. Einstein's theory discards the idea of action at a distance and shifts the entire consideration to a totally different ground. The cause of interaction between bodies, according to the new theory, is to be sought in the peculiar nature of the space which surrounds the bodies. The presence of matter gives an appreciable curvature to the surrounding space and the matter falls down, as it were along the slope of this curvature according to some difinite law In Einstein's mechanics, the law remains essentially the same though it is formulated in a more rigorous form out of necessity."
Although the scientists have not come to postulate in clear terms the existence of a separate medium of rest, like aether
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79. Published in the Proceedings of the Physics Seminar, Allahabad University, July, 1925.
80. If we accept the Jaina view, the point becomes quite clear. It is the all-pervading invisible medium of rest adharma through which gravitation makes itself felt.
81. The nearest approach to the idea of the medium of rest is the field concept which has been developed by Einstein and others in the name of the Unified Field Theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. The field did not exist for the physicist of early years of the 19th century. For him only matter and its changes were real. But the field concept has grown steadily and matter is being overshadowed by the field. Modern science recognizes two realities; Matter and field. In the words of Einstein and Infeld "the electromagnetic field is, for the modern physicist, as real as the chair on which he sits." To quote the same authors further: "A new concept appears in physics, the most important invention since Newton's time: