Talk:Imponderable fluid

Removed information?
This edit by Mr. Jaydiem seems to have removed some important info.


 * Gottfried Leibniz mentions with great disapproval a certain Nicolaas Hartsoeker who supposed that atoms moved in an ambient fluid, though the idea is not unlike his own. It is difficult to trace the origin of the hypothesis, but Galileo Galilei and Thomas Hobbes both speak of a subtle aether. The conception of an all-pervading imponderable fluid of this kind has formed part of many theories, and aether came to be very generally adopted as a favourite name for the fluid, but caloric was also much thought of as a medium. We even find half-a-dozen imponderable co-existent fluids regarded with favour,— one called heat, another electricity, another phlogiston, another light, and what not, with little hard atoms swimming about, each endowed with forces of repulsion and attraction of all sorts, as was thought desirable. This idea of the constitution of matter was perhaps the worst of all. These imponderable fluids were mere names, and these forces were suppositions, representing no observed facts.

It seems that this was clearly a "lousy" POV edit. The next part, important though as it is, was removed.


 * No attempt was made to show how or why the forces acted, but gravitation being taken as due to a mere "force", speculators thought themselves at liberty to imagine any number of forces, attractive or repulsive, or alternating, varying as the distance, or the square, cube, or higher power of the distance, etc. At last, Ruđer Bošković got rid of atoms altogether, by supposing them to be the mere centre of forces exerted by a position or point only, where nothing existed but the power of exerting a force.

And, there needs to be a correction back from the 'ether' >> 'aether', as the modern context should be used. --J. D. Redding 02:22, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

&mdash; &mdash; &mdash;
 * Greetings, J. D. Redding! Please see below my responses to your concerns:
 * Regarding your first block of quoted material: I'm not sure what you're unhappy about here. The only changes I made were to clean up the wiki markup, remove excessive superfluous links (see MOS:LINK), and make the quoted text appear as it does in the original material being quoted. I don't see where you're getting anything related to WP:NPOV.
 * Regarding your second block of quoted material: As I stated in the edit summary, I removed that material because it was not germane to the subject of this article (see WP:OFFTOPIC and WP:LONGQUOTE).
 * Regarding the spelling of "ether" in the quoted material: As "ether" is an acceptable variant spelling of the term (see the first sentence of Aether theories), and arguably attributable to differences in American and British spelling, there is no compelling reason to override the general rule that quoted material should be left intact (see MOS:QUOTE).
 * I hope this helps. Cheers! — Jaydiem (talk) 18:32, 1 July 2014 (UTC)