PROBLEM OF THE ETHER.

Shannon News, 2 March 1928, Page 3

PROBLEM OF THE ETHER.

MAT BE SEAT OF LIFE. In an article in Popular Science Monthly, the eminent British scientist, Sir Oliver Lodge, discusses the possibility of producing life in the laboratory." After referring in general-terms to the several aspects of the problem, he proceeds: —“It is plain to everyone that matter does not exhaust even the physical universe. ... “If ihe ether is constituted as I believe it is, it must be the seat of enormous energy, not necessarily indefinite, but l'ar beyond any. energy of which we have any conception. All the energies that wo experience in matter are but a minute and residual fraction of the ethereal energy of which they-are a feeble manifestation. My speculation is that: this boundless ether thus full of energy is utilised, and is impregnated throughout with something that might be called life and mind in the highest degree—that it is the home of the ideal and supernatural, and that all life and mind we are conscious of is but a tiny fraction of this majestic reality. “I conceive of the ether as the vehicle or physical instrument of this, supreme mind —it may lie that spirit, is a better, term—that spirit permeates and infuses everything, and that it controls, sustains, and has brought into being the visible and tangible frame of things. In myself the conviction has gradually formed that the physical ether is "literally and physically squirming or pulsating with life and mind. It is as if wc might regard it as a great reservoir of life, from which separate individual fragments can from time to time be drawn as from a store of raw' material in a warehouse. Life is not really generated but is entrapped by matter, and so it may be possible for ns _p ro l)ably some centuries hence —to construct, an efficient trap and thus to offer a material habitation to otherwise pure ethereal life. “Many persons, I know, will feel afraid of such a conclusion. They will say that such a self-acting mechanism for the creation of life would remove from the universe the need for a planning and creative mind, so as to be out of harmonv with certain .deeply implanted instincts and religious ideas. These fears seem to me groundless. For the process wc have assumed as some day possible in the laboratory is surely "not a self-acting process at all. A chemist who in the future may discover how to construct protoplasm and to infuse it with vitality is himself no self-acting machine. He surely is full of knowledge and contrivance and planning, and is conducting operations full of understanding and design. That life, therefore, when it appears, will not have come into being without antecedent life. The chemist or physicist who docs it will have been alive, and will have only accomplished it through the agency of a powerful mind. The phenomenon will not have occurred haphazardly or without thought,. There is nothing in the process to which, exception need be taken. Rather it might be welcomed even by the religious as showing what mind and thought, v'ere necessary to produce any imitation of actual existence. If we are wise we shall never be afraid of any progress in knowledge; we shall never oppose or obstruct the achievements of science.”