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Show Page 288 fully prepared for higher and more God-like purposes, than merely to traverse the wilds of space...it is studded with vegetation, and filled with animal life, and peopled with moral and intelligent beings, who also by law may attain to immortality and endless life. All these laws came from the Great Supreme Architect of the universe." 41 Orson was thus able to construct a physics in perfect conformity to the revelations. He had no more need of philosophy, with its numerous semantic traps that had caused him so much difficulty. Now, he felt he had used the inarguable language of mathematics to show that a rarefied form of matter, analogous to the "spirit matter" described 42 by Joseph Smith, cycles in immense currents throughout space, accounting for gravitation and other oblique forces. In addition, at the vortices 43 can be found "great solar centers" or "glorified worlds." These cosmic whorls are in turn set in motion by greater ones, until the first creation is reached - "Kolob, nearest to the celestial...First in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time...holding the 44 key of power also, pertaining to other planets..." In the light of modern physics, Orson's theories are intriguing but clearly based on out-moded science. "Ether drag" was indeed the subject of vital controversy at the time of Orson's writing, with many propositions afloat similar to Orson's concept of ethereal resistance. Only two years after Orson published Key to the Universe, however, the famous Michelson-Morley experiment established that light travels in all directions at equal velocity, striking the first blow at the whole idea of resistant ether. Eventually, the very existence of the ether was called into question, and, with the publication of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in 1905, most scientists concluded that the qualities attributed to ether could just as easily apply to Einstein's "space-time continuum." When Einstein solved the problem of Mercury's unusual orbital |