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of the planets are perfectly regular and show no signs of any loss of this kind. In the words of Denton, the Newtonian aether is rigid, yet allows all matter to move about it without friction or resistance; it is elastic but cannot be distorted. It moves but its motion cannot be detected; it exerts force on matter but matter exerts no force on it : it has no mass nor has it any parts which can be identified; it is said to be at rest relatively to the fixed stars, yet the stars are known to be in motion relatively to one another.
A great many phenomena, culminating in the Michelson experiment and the theory of relativity, showed that the aether must be something very different from ordinary terrestrial substances.
Eddington writes about aether in his famous book, "The Nature of the Physical world” that it does not mean from the above that the aether is abolished. We need an aether.......... In the last century, it was widely believed that the aether was a kind of matter. It would be difficult to say when this view died out. Nowadays, it is agreed that aether is not a kind of matter. Being non-material, its properties are quite unique.
Thus, it seems that science and Jain physics agree absolutely in so far as they call Dharma non-material, non-atoinic, non-discrete, continuous, co-extensive with space, indivisible and as a necessary medium for motion and one which does not move.
(5) Medium of Rest or Adharma : Adharma is the auxiallary cause of rest to soul and matter. It is the principle which guarantees the permanance of the world sructure. It assists the staying of soul and matter which are stationery just as the shade of a tree helps the staying of travellers. But Adharma does not stay those which are moving. It also pervades the entire universe and has all other characteristics like Dharma. To summarise, it is a non-living, formless, inactive, continuous medium without which equilibrium in the universe would be impossible and the souls and the atoms would have become scattered in infinite space. It is the binding force which is responsible for a stable universe, without it, there would be chaos and no cosmos.
The modern equivalent of Adharma may be looked upon as Newton's force of gravitation. According to Newton's law, all bodies with which we are acquainted, when raised into the air and quietly abandoned, descend to the earth's surface. They are urged thereto by a force or effort which, although it is beyond our power to trace, we call Gravity. According to law of gravitations, every particle of matter pulls every other particle directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them, i.e. the heavier the bodies are, the greater is the mutual force of attraction and greater the seperation, the smaller is the force of attraction. If the distance between them is doubled, the force of attraction becomes one-fourth and if it is trebled, it becomes one-ninth and so on.
It was the genius of Newton to extend the law of gravitation from the earth to heavenly bodies. He came early to suspect that the force which keeps the moon
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