MIGHTY MAN

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXIII, Issue 11834, 16 January 1933, Page 3

MIGHTY MAN

CONQUERING- SPACE

HOW IT IS EYE HAS GROWN

USES OF ASTRONOMY

Forty years ago, at the time of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, certain rays of. light started on their journey earthwards from t]ie giant star Arcturns., They are duo to arrive here this coming year, 1933, and will pro> vide the impetus for the official opening of the coming Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition, writes Wade Chance in the London “Daily Mail”. Tlio rays of A returns, [which is forty light-years distance, or 210 trillion miles, will fall on a powerful telescope in the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin; focus on a photoelectric coll, dislodge some electrons, then, sent by electric impulse lo the Chicago Exposition, will turn on the lights and start; the wheels going round.

How small and inconsiderable a being is man,' inhabiting a second-rate satellite of a fourth-rate and moribund star on the rim of an inferior Galaxy. •Yet man has grown so great that his voice rides the ether even to the lifeless moon, his mind projects itself to the distant corners of the universe, measures and'weighs t]ie stars, defines their elements, and registers their heat—even of the expiring b!ay,c of those stars [which may have died ages ago. But now approaches mail’s surpassing leat in this god-like progress in t]ie great telescope being fashioned for the Pacific slope, through the munificence of a one-lime bobbin-boy in a Scottish mill. It will enlarge the one-fifth of an inch pupil of the human eye to a width of nine feet, collect 400,000 times as much light as the unaided eye, bring into vision and record on photographic plates 1500 million stars, and the island universes, millions of light-years distant, receding at the incredible velocity of from 4000 to 12,000 miles a second. ft will, however, bring the moon within forty miles of the earth, revealing clearly tjie lunar Appenines 20 miles high. HOW ASTRONOMY BEGAN. The uses of astronomy began about. 4000 years 13. C., when the beginning of tiro New Year, practically coincident. with the inundation of the Nile, was fixed by observation of the heliacal rising of the giant istar Sirius. Egyptian instruments were adopted unchanged by the Arabs, Hindus, and Chinese, but were improved by the Greeks. Only two or three thousand stars are visible to tlie naked eye, and Ptolemy, with his simple instruments, listed only 1022 of them. Aristarchus of Samos recognised the dominance of the sun as the central body of the solar system 300 8.C., but Ptolemy denied this—and later the Church, and burned Bruno for asserting it.

Twelve centuries passed before the monk Copernicus in 1543 reaffirmed the correct planetary motion, and Kepler removed the last- doubt bv showing that the planets moved in ollipsois instead of in circles. But all those ancient astronomers worked only through the human eye and its tiny lens.

Then came Galileo, who supplied the visual demonstration hitherto Inching, with In’s invention of the telescope in Hi 10, a slender tube iota feet long, with a concave mirror 23 inches in diameter, which collected 80 times as much light as the human eye, and with it suddenly pushed out the boundaries of the known stellar universe, brought half a- million stars into range, and shifted ihc sun from its traditional position as a satellite of the earth to its righful place. THE OLDEST SCIENCE. .With this primitive instrument, Galileo revolutionised human thought, established the C'bpornica’n - theory for all time, marked the downfall of medieval superstition, and placed astronomy, the oldest science, on an unshaken foundation for ever.

Then a century passed, and lTerschel read before the Royal Society liis first memoir on siclerial astronomy, the great field beyond our solar system. He then estimated the stars in both hemispheres to number 5,000,000. The world's greatest telescopes are well known, the iatest: and greatest being the Hooker instrument at Mi. Wilson, Pasadena, California, completed in 1921, with its 100-inch lons, 13 inches thick. Jn 1912 1 saw the five-ton glass lens of the Hooker instrument being ground and polished by hand in the Pasadena laboratory, a work of years. It- has become the Mecca of modern science, and Einstein journeyed to see it, and to modify ]us theories, when, only the other day, lie repudiated his curved-space conception and his finite universe—discarding his palpably untenable adventure in theorem .

The Hooker telescope collects about 200,000 times as much light as the human eye, and records photographically 2,000,000 spiral nebulae or star clusters containing millions of stars brighter than our own Galaxy, some of them of so vast a iscale that light requires 500 years to cross them travelling ISO,OOO miles a second. Tho diameter of Betelgueso exceeds n hundred million miles, over a hundred times greater than our sun, and its light takes 100 years to reach us. THIRTY-TON DISC, Astronomy, like art, is dependent on private munificence. This explains, why telescopic construction, from an engineering viewpoint, has until lately lagged behind that of battleships, skyscrapers, and bridges. Up to now, the best we can do is to collect the rays in an area of the earth’s surface of only 100 inches in diameter. In the construction of the new 200incji telescope tho only physical problem is the large concave mirror now being made by the General Eloctrio Company at cost. The disc, twice ns thick as tho Hooker, nearly 17 feet in diameter, weighing 30 tons, will he made with fused quartz, and its surface must he parabolically curved with an error of Jess than two-million-ths of an inch. A tube and mirror weighing 150

ons will be mounted ecjnntonally

manipulated with east and precision, and will rcaeb the entire sky from oeyond the North Pole to the Equator. This new instrument will have a light, collecting area four times Thai, of the Hooker telescope, will be ten times ns powerful, and will penetrate three times as far into space, and open up an unexplored sphere about 30 times the volume of what lias already been sounded. Does anyone still ask—What are the uses of astronomy? At- one instance. American scientists with their telescopes provided the means of combating the Zeppelins, had the war lasted a few months longer. They first discovered non-inflammable helium gas in the sun. then extracted it from the Texas natural gas wells, and when the Armistice was signed hundreds of cylinders of compressed helium lay at the docks for shipment to England, where it would have made ilie Allied dirigibles masters of rue

As for the Einstein Theory of curved space. Sir James Jeans in his Monel lecture at Manchester, and in -The Times'’ recently, still maintains that space is curved, because. forsooth, the earth's surface is curved—surely a trivial comparison. And upon this unsubstantial basis of curved space lie continues to follow Einstein's lead of a finite universe. . EINSTEIN'S RECANTATION. But Einstein lias just recanted on both theories, and betrayed his followers. Joans is evidently unaware of the unequivocal joint statement of Einstein and his collaborator. the Hutch astronomer dp Sitter, in “The Proceediugs of the National Academy of Science," wherein, following a re-, cent conference which these two held at Aft. Wilson. Einstein states: — “We must conclude that at the present- time it is possible to represent the facts without assuming a curvature of three-fold dimensional iSp«ee.” lie continues:— "In the Euclidean universe now reenthroned. light travels in straight lines and goes on and on for ever and ever. A ray of light would not traverse the circuit of the universe ami come hack to where it started. Curvature of space. ... is banished front the universe.” This joint announcement means that the universe around us may be not only unbounded, but infinite, instead of finite and unbounded, as Einstein and his followers have previously believed.

When this epoch-making new telescope is completed, it will be a brave man who takes the first look through its 30-ton crystal orb. into tlie vast and frightening vista which hitherto the Creator has looked upon.