A NEW SUN

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIX, Issue 8784, 14 July 1914, Page 8

A NEW SUN

LECTURER’S NOVEL THEORY. Last night, in the concert chamber of the Town Hall, Mr Joseph Taylor (consulting geologist and mining engineer, Nelson) delivered a lecture on the subject of “ Sunspots and Solar Physics—recent discoveries and developments.” There was a meagre attendance. Numerous striking and original lantern slides illustrated the lecture, which enhanced some of Mr Taylor’s original discoveries concerning the structure of the sun and the cause of gravitation. Each point was illustrated by practical experiments and diagrams. In the absence of Mr A. H. Hindmarsh, M.P., Councillor R. A. AVright took the chair. In introducing the speaker Mr AVright paid a tribute to his research in solar physics. Commencing his lecture, Mr Taylor referred to the general ignorance on the subject of the sun. He had, he said, been studying tho sun for forty years, its structure; functions, position in space, and history. He did not wish to repeat theories that everyone had heard all their lives. Up to 300 years ago people believed that tho sun moved round the world—the Ptolemaic theory. This should teach us that’ science’s duty was to correct sense-im-pressions. The discovery of radium and radio-activity in the twentieth century was, altering a great number of former theories concerning the structure and composition of heavenly bodies, and the spectroscope and other instruments wore also enlarging our knowledge. Sunspots had been misconceived, and following on this the functions and structure of the sun were misconceived. The sun did not shme, nor did it give out heat. It was only the centre of focal reflections from all sides, from which centre radiated not light rays, but lays of a character similar to Rontgen rays, radium rays. They proceeded for millions of miles before they changed their character at a focal centre between the sun and the earth. The heat was only produced by friction with the earth’s atmosphere, and from heat came light; both these changes came after the change at the focal point, where magnetism and electricity began. This meant a revision of our ideas concerning the structure of the sun. It was neither solid, liquid, nor gas, but it was the fourth state of matter —that which would be got from gas the same way as gas came from liquid, anil a liquid from a solid —that constituted the mass of the sun. The centre of this mass bore an equal pressure from all sides, and so had no chemical change, no motion, and so no heat or light. Schwabe, said tho speaker, first drew attention to the importance of sunspots by the publication of_ his tables of periodicity in 1843. Kepler first drew attention to the optical sides of solar physics when he split up the sun’s rays by means of a three-sided prism. Newton managed to reverse the rays into tho original whiteness, and introduced spectrum analysis. Most investigators believed sun-spots to bo eruptions on the sun’s surface, but the speaker believed them to be caused by the passing of bodies across the sun’s surface millions of miles away. These bodies sometimes collided, and the appearance of prominences on the sun was the result. Mr Taylor concluded his address by declaring that he was sounding the death-knell of the old theory that most astronomers held to-day with regard to tho sun. The sun had its drawing power, not from its mass but from its lack of mass. The earth, the sun, every molecule, man’s body, are built on tho same principle—a vital energy in the vacuous interior made of a form of matter corresponding to the fourth dimension