RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 191, 10 May 1937, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events (By Kickshaws.! A police cook, it is stated, loves policemen in the raw. It gives him such grand opportunities to make them smart. * * If there were as much talk about raising Guernica as there has been about razing the place, maybe we could honestly call civilisation progressive. _ It. may be true, as stated, that the Australian Davis Cup players are no good at golf, but net results, after all. are the onlv businesslike way to judge. * * * Regarding old documents “Whakapapa” writes:—“l have a tattered passport issued to my ancestor (’gentilhm. anglais’) in 1816, covering travel in France when relations between the countries were, I should say, still strained. It is visa-ed with the seal of about a dozen French mairies and police stations, and apparently stood him in good stead. Rumour states that he returned with a hundredweight or so of contraband in the shape of a French wife.” * « * This idea of welding our tram-rails with thermit probably utilises the hottest thing in this world. If we want anything hotter we have to go elsewhere for it. Curiously enough, it is not necessary to go to the place usually associated with great heat, but to "the sun. The surface of the sun is probably very little hotter than manmade temperatures. Estimates vary from about 10,060 degrees Fahrenheit lo 12,000 degrees. This is warm, but delicate methods of estimating manmade temperatures show that some welding arcs reach 13,000 degrees. It is when one gets under the surface of the sun that man-made temperatures become insignificant. Nobody has ever even seen the inside of the sun. Yet it is possible to calculate that it cannot be less than 40,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Experts would dearly love to be able to produce a temperature of that size here on earth. Their first task would be the impossible one of something to contain the material, and their second the fact that mutter at that temperature would be bouncing around at 125 miles a second. » » » Temperature plays a very important part in our lives. It affords a dally topic for public chatter. It also affords a topic for astronomical experts who are of the opinion that there must be very few worlds where the range of temperature is such that life of a high order could exist. No living creature of the kind found in our own world can live comfortably above the temperature of boiling water or below about 50 degrees below freezing. The upper limit is fixed roughly by the fact that the chemical structure of essential food becomes altered. Another essential to life appears to be water and some form of atmosphere. Since all the planets originally came from the sun, one would have expected similarities. Yet it is difficult to explain why the earth has an atmosphere of oxygen and the great planets an atmosphere of ammonia or marsh gas. Mars is about the only other planet that could support life as we know it in this world. Moreover, it has been estimated that the chances of intelligent life are smaller still in other planetary systems. » * • It is possible to argue almost indefinitely over the importance of temperature to life. For example, there is still a body of opinion that considers that temperature is only comparative, and that life may actually exist on the sun. These enthusiasts point out that the temperature range of life on this world is set by the chemical characteristics of the fundamental element carbon, of which all life is composed. Animals of entirely different composition to those known in the world, not made of carbon compounds, it is argued, might exist on the sun. If that were so, life on the sun would be somewhat trying. The weather conditions, for example, would include winds of incandescent metals blowing at 100,000 miles an hour. Moreover, one would never know when the tolerable warmth of 12,000 degrees on the surface would not alter owing to a sunspot. The inhabitants who fell into a sunspot would be greeted with a change of temperature of millions of degrees, if, indeed, they were not shot into the sun’s atmosphere at a speed of thousands of miles an hour, assisted by whirlwinds of incandescent vapour. * * « The only sure thing concerning temperatures is that there is a bottom limit below which life could not exist. There is nothing colder than minus 273 degrees Centigrade. It is, perhaps, some compensation after the coldest summer on record, that there is a limit to coldness. Life at such an extreme temperature, no matter the composition of the material having life, would appear to be impossible. At that temperature there is no motion among the atoms and molecules of the substance. A deadly stillness pervades, but so far nobody knows just what happens, because nobody has got down to this limit. Scientists have succeeded in getting very close, however, about one twohundredth of a degree above the limit. It seems a little bewildering to think of a thing having no heat at all. but no doubt it is possible to accustom oneself to almost anything. So far as man in concerned the outlook becomes barren enough at minus US degrees—tlie temperature at which alcohol freezes. * * * So far the best use that man can make of the hottest temperatures he can produce it for welding tram-lines or for dropping incendiary bombs on his brother men. Maybe, one day a pinch of thermit may be used for household purposes, such as boiling the family kettle and for other really useful purposes. At any rate we can be thankful that so far tlie sun is still free for all and has not been harnessed directlj’ for killing one another. The potential power in the sun is sufficiently alarming for us to hope that man will never be able to utilise it directly in war. Every square inch of the sun produces 50 horse-power. The whole sun is equivalent, to an engine of 50.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 horse-power. Admittedly the world has to content itself with one-millionth of this, hut it suffices. Just how the sun contrives to go oil-producing this power is a mystery that has never been solved. Jiist why the world happens to have assumed a temperature that can support human beings is another mystery. All we know is that the sun could wipe us out in a few seconds, world and all. so that there could be no trace. What a lot of problems it would solve! « * • Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone; Kindness in another’s trouble; Courage in your own. —Lindsay Gordon.