Identifier: popularsciencemo8313newy (find matches)
Title: Popular science monthly
Year: 1913 (1910s)
Authors:
Subjects: Technology Science
Publisher: New York : McClure, Phillips and Co.
Contributing Library: Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library

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holds that the dependenceof inertia and shape on speed is a gen-uine discovery, while the principle ofrelativity seeks to replace these realchanges in matter by imaginary changesin time. There is an emotional appeal inwords such as electricity, ether andcontinuity, and this becomes evengreater when we pass to life, free-willand immortality, with which Sir Oliver Lodge deals in the second part of hisaddress. It will be remembered thatlast year his predecessor in the presi-dential chair, Professor Shiifer, who isnow lecturing in America, defended themechanistic conception of living bodies.Perhaps a physiologist is more com-petent than a physicist to decide onwhich side the weight of the evidencelies, and indeed in the course of his ad-dress Sir Oliver Lodge warns us fre-quently against negative generaliza-tions. In the case of living beings heholds, however, that life introduces anincalculable element. The vagaries ofa fire or of a cyclone ought to be pre- 414 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
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From a photograph in the Illustrated London News.Professor Ehrlich and Dr. Hata.
dictable by Laplaces calculator, giventhe initial positions, velocities and thelaw of acceleration of the molecules,but no mathematician could calculatethe orbit of the common housefly. Aspider in the galvanometer of a physicist would introduce a superphysicalcause. Still the speaker did not defendvitalism as an appeal to an undefinedcause. A living thing obeys the lawsof physics like everything else, but itinitiates processes and produces resultsthat without it could not have occurred.A wide public will doubtless be in- terested in Sir Oliver Lodges state-ment of his conviction that occurrencesnow regarded as occult, not only can beexamined and reduced to order by themethods of science, but that evidenceso examined has convinced him thatmemory and affection are not limitedto association with matter and that per-sonality persists after bodily death,that evidence goes to prove that dis-carnate intelligenc

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