ANOTHER BLOW AT MAN'S SELFRESPECT

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 18, 21 July 1934, Page 25

ANOTHER BLOW AT MAN'S SELFRESPECT

"The Times," in one of tliose humorous sub-leaderct for which it has become noted in recent years, waxes merry over the results of recent astronomical research. This is the way that it deals with the pronouncements ol serious-minded investigators regarding the diameter of the universe: The men of science are at it again, we are too brave to let them make our flesh creep, but we cannot prevent them irom making it shrink. The trouble is that they will not let tho universe alone. Only a few years ago a matter of a thousand or fifteen hundred million light years was looked upon as a respectable^ diameter for it. It might have been thought that that was enough for a tmiverse with the most swollen ideas of its own importance, seeing that a single light year means a trifle of some six billion miles. But no; much will have more, and to him that hath shall be given. The recently-reported calculations of an eminent American astronomer now insist .upon a. diameter of six thousand million light years. It is just as well to look where this unbridled/ multiplication is taking us. The ordinary man, by now a faithful, if'bewildered, disciple ot relativity, must recognise that rt is only a polite way of saying that he has suffered a corresponding slunk- i age to a quarter or a sixth of his former! self. After all, he has his dimensional self-respect. His size Wy be a poor thing, but it is his own ; ■ -

Man used to comfort himself for the terrifying magnitude of astronomical bodies and distances by reflecting ho^r much bigger he himself was than the atom. Consoling experts used to point out to him that he was nicely placed just about midway between the infinitely small, in the shape of the atom, and the infinitely large, in the shape of a Betelgeuze or a galactic nebula. If he cowered miserably before the majestic proportions of the cine, he still towered above the incredible minuteness of the other.

The new measurement has given man a violent push, towards the lower encl of the scale. He is now definitely on the. small side. It is an added grievance that another line of research has even robbed him of his atom, by sublimating it into an indeterminate and

elusive something which is neither wave nor particle, but a bit of both, and always the one when it is important to treat it as tho other. No satisfactory corporeal comparison can bo based on such a quicksand of perversity. -

But this is by no means the end of the trouble. We must not forget the greater nebulae. According to the new dimensions there are five hundred billion of them. These mighty masses have the,unworthy and un-British habit of running away the faster the farther distant they are. Their rates of recession were staggering enough, with a universe of comparatively moderate

.-..Speeds...of thirty or forty thousand miles a second have already' been observed from the Mount Wilson Obsei^atory. At the rim of a universe of the ncwly-caleulated diameter they are rushing away at the speed of light itself. There is some comfort in that thonght at any rate. If they are receding at the speed of light, it would seem to the plain man that their light can no longer reach us. Then ■at last there,will be an end to further observable magnification of the universe, and we petty men can settle down to.ascertain once and for all where wo stand in the scale of things. '

But there is a snag even in that comfortable thought. How.can.wo know what these stupendous projectiles arc about when they have swum out of our ken? .AYe have been taught, by the blind and auto-suggestive repetition of boundless, but not infinite, to think of spaco as spherical, so that a sufficiently determined and long-winded globe-trot-ter of the universe would come back at long last' to his starting-point.

Can it be that, while we are straining our eyes after tho disappearing nebulae, they are really preparing to charge us in the rear, like a jungle buffalo hunting his would-be hunter? If such disturbing thoughts come from using a 100-inch telescope, what wonder that the 200-inch reflector is proving sr» refractory in tho niaking? Probably some philanthropist among : the experts, seeing as iii -a. glass darkly what further troubles are brewing for his wretched fellows, is. quietly doing his host, to keep them from coming tothe boil.