Abstract
A REVIEWER can scarcely be expected to read the whole of the thousand and odd pages which Herr Vogt has required to express his views on the origin and decay of the world. As one looks down the table of contents, he feels that it would require a mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, a biologist rolled into one to do justice to the many various subjects which here come under notice, and if oppressed with this view he begins with the “methodologische” introduction and struggles with the adjectives, “fearfully and wonderfully made,” he may be tempted to turn for a little relaxation to the explanatory illustrations “scattered through the text. One of these (p. 260) is to explain the genesis of the solar system. The author gives some account of the cosmogony of Kant and Laplace, and recalls some of the objections which have been urged against these views. He is particularly severe on the insufficient explanation offered for the density of the planets closest to the sun. Saturn, he states, retired from the ring-making process when the mass of the ring was 1/118 of its own mass; while in the case of Mercury the sun continued to produce a ring the mass of which is only 1/4,316,550. The evident distaste of Saturn to form rings of smaller mass leads the author to abandon the ring hypothesis altogether and to offer an alternative theory. He conceives spheres of operation (Wirkungssphäre) and Deformierungssysteme (not so easily translated). But if we will imagine three circles, the centres of which form an equilateral triangle and each of the circles touches two others, the circles will form “Deformierungssysteme,” while the enclosed triangular space bounded by the three circles is a “field of operation.” Now in the small space near the points of contact we get the smaller planets formed, Mercury and the earth on one side and Mars and Venus on the other, each planet touching two circles and the next larger planet. Jupiter in this way has room for his giant bulk, pushing Saturn a little on one side, but otherwise is not inconveniently crowded. Of course, the whole merit of such a cosmogony depends upon the “Deformierungssysteme,” and for the manner working these the reader must be referred to the book itself. The second diagram (p. 949) is to illustrate the precession of the equinoxes. Here one would say there is no room for imagination; we have to do with problem in rigid dynamics which is susceptible of but one explanation. But if any one thinks this, he has not reckoned with Herr Vogt, who, as a man of ideas, begins the beginning. Before attempting to explain the cause of any modification in the position of the polar axis it is necessary, he tells us, to understand the laws which determine the constant position of that axis. These laws he proceeds to unfold on “phoronomische” principles, and in his endeavour to follow the author in these same principles the student will be not a little startled find it necessary to project the plane of the Milky Way on a diagram to explain precession. But he will probably not read beyond the following sentence:—
Entstehen und Vergehen der Welt als Kosmischer Kreizprozess. Auf Grund des pyknotischen Substanzbegriffes. Zweite und erweiterte Auflage.
Von. J. G. Vogt. Pp. viii + 1005. (Leipzig: Ernst Wiest, 1901.)
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P., W. Entstehen und Vergehen der Welt als Kosmischer Kreizprozess Auf Grund des pyknotischen Substanzbegriffes Zweite und erweiterte Auflage . Nature 64, 277 (1901). https://doi.org/10.1038/064277a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/064277a0