BLACK MAGIC (?)

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 190, 13 August 1925, Page 10

BLACK MAGIC (?)

(To the Editor.) f-'ir, —I should like to correct one misunderstanding that is evidenced in your reference to the above. So far from my ever having been at Cambridge, I have never been beyond New Zealand. But, when I became an instructor of mathematics, at a rather early age. I had the advantage of tuition from one very able Cambridge mathematician, Dr. Harvey, who, upon submitting samples of my work to his university, found that somewhat extravagant predictions were made as to my success in that direction. If I am successful now it is in this: That I have got away from the old beaten paths in mathematics and found new ones, which other abler men will probably follow more successfully than I can do. And it is not exactly that solar electricity escapes through openings torn in the sun's outer covering by storms, though storms do occur there upon a very much vaster scale than they do upon the earth, and for the very same reason they are always cyclonic or anti-eyc.'onie in character. But the secret lies rather in the "pro- : minences," the most conspicuous of ' which usually follow immediately in I the rear of sun-spots. The origin of these immense tongues of flame, composed mainly of incandescent gases, cannot be explained without dealing rather j minutely with the sun's remarkable ■ internal workings. They rise to various groat altitudes above the sun's general surface in different latitudes; their average height in any one latitude varies throughout the solar cycle of about eleven years, shooting up through the sun's photosphere, chromosphere and atmosphere, they act as conductors through these more or less insulating strata; and the latitude at which a discharge thus escapes is the main thing that determines the latitude at which its force will take effect upon the earth, or any other planet. Thus, sun-spots are indirectly associated with terrestrial storms, earthquakes and many other things; and because of the sun's polarity the solar hemisphere that is at any time or period the more active (and the activity is never equal in both) will cause the corresponding hemisphere of the earth to bo the more disturbed. The records needed for further development of the study are by no means confined to meteorology. The requirement a have, an exceedingly wide range, and most important of all arc the solar records of the past, which we can nowtabulate in such ways a> to make them ! yield results of a* rather startling nature. I see no limit to the possibilities.—l am, etc., FREDERICK R. FIELD.