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Evening Star, Issue 20995, 8 January 1932, Page 13

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—» LIKE A BUBBLE UNCEASING EXPANSION Like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn terhples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a wrack behind. —Prosepro, in ' Tho Tempest.’ The sombre drama of the end of the world as it may ultimately be viewed by some spectator in another planet was pictured by Sir Arthur Eddington, the astronomer, says the ‘ Daily Telegraph.’ He was delivering his presidential address to the Physical Society in the Imperial College of Science and Technology, South Kensington. “ The theory of the expanding universe might also bo called the theory of the shrinking atom,” Sir Arthur_ said. “Let us take the view of a cosmic being. Watching us for some few thousand million years he sees us gradually shrinking; atoms, animals, plants, even the galaxies, all share the same contraction; only the intergalactic spaces remains the same. The earth spirals round the siin in an ever-increasing orbit. “ Wo walk the stage of life, performers of a drama for the benefit of the cosmic spectator. As the scenes proceed he notices that the actors are growing smaller and the action growing quicker. “ When the last act opens the curtain rises on midget actors rushing through their parts at frantic speed. Smaller and smaller. Faster and faster. One last microscopic blur of intense agitation. “ And then nothing.” Sir Arthur declared that the material universe was swelling up Jikea bubble. “ Moreover,” he said, “ it is swelling up at a rate which, if not alarming to the ordinary citizen, is very disturbing to theorists. In the time which has elapsed since tho oldest _ terrestrial rocks were formed the radius of the universe has become doubled. “ The simile of a bubble may suggest danger, for when bubbles expand too much, they burst. On this point at least 1 can speak reassuringly. Our bubble of a universe is not going to burst—for the best of reasons. It burst quite a long time ago. “ Up to tho farthest limits surveyed by our telescopes, space is dotted with numerous islands —the spiral nebulae. They are so far apart that light takes about a million years to cross from one island to the next. Each island turns out to be a galaxy of “ The most striking thing is that the galaxies are, with remarkable unanimity, going away from us. More than eighty have been observed to bo moving outwards, and not one lias been found coming in to take their place. “It is an obvious inference that in the course of time the region will be evacuated. Tho nebulie will all be out of reach of our telescopes unless we increase our telescopic power to keep pace. I find that an observer of nebula will have to double the aperture of his telescope every 1,300,000,000 years merely to keep pace with their recession* “ Sir James Jeans delights in telling us that we have billions of years before us in which to find out all that can bo found out about the universe. I suggest, however, that there is urgency as regards the spiral nebuhe; if we leave it too late, there will be none left to examine.”-