"But so far was Newton from asserting that bodies really act... over a distance, independently of anything in between them, that in a letter to Bentley... quoted by Faraday... he says:—"It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact, as it must do if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it... That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body can act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe that no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.""
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On Action at a Distance
On Action at a Distance, is an article by James Clerk Maxwell which appeared in Nature (Mar 6, 1873) Vol VII, Issue 175. It was also published, with minor changes, both in the Proceedings of the of Great Britain Vol. VII. 1876, and in Vol. 2, The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell in 1890. The article is a discussion of scientific and mathematical investigations relating to the concepts of , Michael Faraday's lines of force, and the luminiferous aether. Maxwell was personally responsible f
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