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Show Page 289 path, the ethereal hypothesis was almost universally abandoned. It is important to note, nevertheless, that the present conception of "dynamic space-time" is rooted in the old "ether" idea - and in a few striking ways, Orson Pratt's system foreshadows the attempts by Einstein to construct a so-called "Unified Field Theory" in which matter could be interpreted as "distunbance" in the cycle of time and space. 45 For example, Orson asserts that gravity affects light waves; Einstein's relativity theory was considered proven when in 1919 light from a distant star was observed to bend around the sun during an eclipse - exactly as Einstein, and Orson Pratt, had predicted. Ironically, just as Key to the Universe rolled off the press in England, Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany - on March 14, 1879. Orson's idea of planetary formation - that jetties in the ether bring worlds together by accretion - conforms quite readily to the "planetesimal theory"of the origin of the solar system, a theory only 46 recently advanced in Orson's time. Nebular theories, which Orson attacked, were losing ground in the late Nineteenth Century, but have gained wider acceptance once again in our day. All of Orson's analytical geometry is sound; though his concepts may be out of fashion, they resemble in curious ways some of the most advanced theories of our own time. As an exposition of Joseph Smith's astronomical revelations in the Book of Abraham, Orson's hypothesis provides a methodology for the Priesthood, "the governing power, which governs...fixed planets or 47 stars." In his own way, Orson had met the cryptic challenge of the Prophet, who had seen in the hieroglyphics of Egypt "the grand Key"to the heavens. Orson's preoccupation with Abrahamic astronomy was increased by a wave of interest among Europeans in the pyramids of Egypt. Scotland's |
