All orbits, including the orbits of comets, are the result of
compromises in gravities. Now you have got to get over the idea
that because one body attracts another strongly it is likely to
draw it smack into it. It doesn’t. I made an apparatus in my
laboratory the other day to show my students about that.
I fixt up a little gun capable of shooting a steel ball quite a
distance up an inclined plate of glass. The ball shot upward and
then rolled directly back into the muzzle of the gun time after
time. That was to show what a comet would do if just merely shot
out into space to be uninfluenced by any other heavenly bodies
after it got a start.
Then I put a powerful electric magnet under the plate of glass,
quite a little distance away from the track of my steel ball.
This time when it was shot upward instead of keeping on its
straight path or swerving directly into the magnet, as some of
my students expected it to do, it shot on past, curving its
course toward the magnet, and then finally it swung around
the magnet in very much the way the comet is swinging around
the sun. On its return course it swung off in a new direction
altogether. My students were quite delighted with the oval
course taken by the steel ball. It was just such a course
as they had seen mapped out for Halley’s visitor.--H.
JACOBY, New York _Times_.
(508)
=Compulsion in Religion=--See MILITANT EVANGELISM.