We come to a classic imposition like this, and at first we feel helpless. We are told that this thing is so. It is as if we were modes of motion and must go on, but are obstructed by an absolute bar of ultimate steel, shining, in our way, with an infinite polish.
But all appearances are illusions.
No one with a microscope doubts this; no one who has gone specially from ordinary beliefs into minuter examination of any subject doubts this, as to his own specific experience—so then, broadly, that all appearances are illusions, and that, by this recognition, we shall dissipate resistances, monsters, dragons, oppressors that we shall meet in our pilgrimage. This bar-like calculation is itself a mode of motion. The static can not absolutely resist the dynamic, because in the act of resisting it becomes itself proportionately the dynamic. We learn that modifications rusted into the steel of our opposition. The period of Algol, which Vogel carried out to a minute’s 55th second, was, after all, so incompetently determined that the whole imposition was nullified—
Astronomical Journal, 11-113:
That, according to Chandler, Algol and his companion do not revolve around each other merely, but revolve together around some second imperceptibility—regularly.
Bull. Soc. Astro. de France, Oct., 1910:
That M. Mora has shown that, in Algol’s variations there were irregularities that neither Vogel nor Chandler had accounted for.
The Companion of Sirius looms up to our recognition that the story must be nonsense, or worse than nonsense—or that two light comedies will now disappear behind something darker. The story of the Companion of Sirius is that Prof. Auwers, having observed, or in his mania for a pencil and something to scribble upon, having supposed he had observed, motions of the star Sirius, had deduced the existence of a companion, and had inevitably calculated its orbit. Early in the year 1862, Alvan Clark, Jr., turned his new telescope upon Sirius, and there, precisely where, according to Auwers’ calculations, it should be, saw the companion. The story is told by Proctor, writing thirty years later: the finding of the companion, in the “precise position of the calculations”;
