WORLD SAVED.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 42, 17 January 1935, Page 12

WORLD SAVED.

BY A LAYER OF GAS. Wonderful colours we have never seen and to which we should be “col- , our-blind,” and light rays that would kill off the world’s population, were , described by Sir James Jeans, the scientist, in a talk broadcast from London recently. “Our ‘window into space,’ ” he said, . “is covered over with a layer of gasozone which filters out certain colours of light altogether. i “If this filter of ozone-gas were suddenly removed, wo should see no new colours and no added vividness to the light we already see. “The new colours would be there all right, but we should not see a single one of them —we are colour-blind to them all. “Never, in all the hundreds of millions of years of our development, have our eyes encountered light of the colours of which I am now speaking; the colour filter of ozone has relentlessly excluded them. “As we have never seen these colours. we have not even any names for them, although the physicist in his laboratory can describe them and has instruments with which to detect them. “If the colour filter of ozone were suddenly removed these instruments would disclose the fact at once. So would the skins of our bodies. “We should become browner and browner until at last we became black —burnt up by the new light—at least if we survived so long, for I do not think we should live for long if all the rays of the sun fell on us. “Thus this layer of ozone fulfils the important function of keeping us alive. “If we could equip ourselves with eyes to see all colours, and could pass beyond the ozone layer, we should see a wonderful sight. The stars would appear incomparably brighter and more vivid than they do now with the ozone layer cutting off the greater part of their radiation. And their colours would be incomparably more varied. “The range of colours we can detect ■' is small compared with the vast range known to Nature.”