A NEW EPIC OF CREATION.

Otago Witness, Issue 2801, 20 November 1907, Page 80

A NEW EPIC OF CREATION.

Call Snvdn- contributes a striking reH*vw to the- Xfv Vo«-k Times of a new

book entitled " The World Process" ("Das Werden der Welten"), by Professor Arrhenius, the great Swedish scientist. At the close of the review he makes this interesting admission :—": — " It was the privilege of the writer, in a recent volume, to give the ideas of Arxhenius their first connected presentation in English. These ideas formed, as it were, the capstone or the keystone of a view of the world process which has been slowly growing through the centuries, and that must eventually impose upon all who trouble their minds with such matters. No doubt the book was a little lengthy, and the newer material subordinated to its place in a general scheme, but it is worthy of note that of a hundred reviewers not one gave to these new ideas so much as a line or a word." " There was, perhaps, no living mind so splendidly equipped to consider these problems anew," writes Carl Snyder. "Professor Arrhenius stands in this generation in something of the same position that Helmholtz did to the preceding. With Van't Hoff, he was the founder of physical chemistry. "To the question of the origin of the sun's energy this great scientist addresses himself. Arrhenius holds that the source of the sun's energy is chemical. He denies that it is due to the infall of meteorites or simply to a solar contraction. The explanation involves one of the most difficult and paradoxical facts

of chemical action. Most chemical action, like the burning of coal, takes place with a giving off of heat. When hydrogen and oxygen combine there is a violent explosion", and, water is. formed. But when bkygek afld nitrogen of- the air are- "made to combine, as in the formation of nitric acid, this" chemic" union absorbs heat. These heat-absorbing" combinations take place at high temperatures," ahcT the peculiar fact about .^them, is that the higher I the temperature AiMe"' ~<motd~t Stable they* are. Incidentally, it is these, heat-absorb-ing- combinations which are" the ** foundation of all explosives, like dynamite, gun cotton, etc. , . „ . j "The atmosphere of the sun appears it 1 be in a state of violent "and tremendous agitation. It is swept by vast billows known to us as sun spots. As the gases of- the outer solar atmosphere Ate Swept downward beneath' the surface they are subjected to an enormously in- j creased temperature and pressure. Under these conditions Arrhenius conceives that combinations take place of the heat-ab-sorbing variety, producing substances of an explosive energy compared with which J dynamite and its like are as caps for toy pistols. When, now, these gaseous compounds are again swept up into the j outer and cooler layers of the solar j atmosphere they dissociate — explode, so | to speak — with a terrific liberation of energy and heat. "Arrhenius conceives the sum of solar energy must be millions of times what we | have hitherto supposed, and quite , spffi- j cient to maintain the present temperature ! and radiation, not merely for millions or \ even milliards, but for millions of mil- j lions of years. So does it happen that J the clearing up of an obscure point in chemical theory — the theory of explosives — becomes the means, when with the highly imaginative brain which all great men of science possess, of clearing up one of the three or four most perplexing problems in the theory of the universe. ' '

" More baffling still has been the problem of how the present order of balance of the cosmos — the world scheme— is kept up. Everything leads us to believe that this process is of cyclic nature — that it is like the ceaseless turning of a wheel — that it has had no beginning and that it will never have an end.

"There is little reason to suppose, for example, that ' the universe was vastly different some billions or trillions of years ago than it is now, or that it will be at a similarly distant future time. What it was from all eternity it probably is, and probably will remain. In the little preface with wheh he Begins, Professor Arrhenius says : — ' The directing concept in this presentation of cosmogonic questions was that the universe (das Weltganze) was always in its nature as if is still. Matter, energy, and life have merely changed form and place in space.' " But until recently it seemed as if the world process were bent towards a clumping of all material of the universe — the matter, if one may dare to use so sordid and unphilosophical a word, into a relatively few bodies, and finally, perchanre, into one cold and crusted mass, ceaselessly spinning the ways of space ; a vast and helpless clod might forefigure the fate of the world. But, obviously, ll such a tendency had been at work throughout eternity it would have come to an end aeons ago, and, as Professor Arrhenius once sagaciously remarked in a private note, there would be nothing now to happen. The capacious mind of Herbert Spencer, sneered at by all the grubbers and men of little wit, saw clearly that there must be a compensating influence. * This influence Arrhenius finds in the pressure of light. Within five or ten years we have come to know that what Clark-Maxwell demonstrated theoretically is true. The light, or, more broadly, radiant energy of any sort, exerts a pressure. This pressure will be in proportion to the surface of a body ; the gravitational pull will be proportional to its mass. Obviously, then, on particles "small enough the pressure of light will counterbalance the force of gravitational attraction.

" The sun, then, is not radiating into space merely floods of energy, but this same energy is carrying off minute particles of matter. These particles falling upon the earth give rise, through the electrical charges they bear, to the Northern Lights, and probably profoundly influence our eaHhly weather, and through that our daily affairs. But the larger portion of this outpour of tenuous matter escapes entirely from the solar system, and, travelling on through space, helps eventually to form the nebuljp from which new worlds are formed.

" Then, again, it is evident that incessantly throughout the heavens suns and systems are crashing one into the other, as the flaring up of 'new stars' — 'novaj,' as they have come to be known — makes clear. The transformed energy of these colossal shocks is unthinkably great, the' development of heat so great as probably to scatter the material of which the colliding systems were formed over such vast areas that it would never again draw together under gravitational force into a single mass. From it several new systems might be born. In this view the world will never have an end. It will simply go on repeating ceaselessly, monotonously, its eternal round. A momentary flutter of this unending cycle is the Blender part of the universe that we have come to know.

" Another fascinating idea of Arrhenius's is that life, like the universe itself, never had a beginning, either on this little earth or anywhere else, but has existed eternally, whatever that vague phrase might mean. He conceives that in the form of spores, extremely minute organisms covered with a sort of crust or shell, the germs of life may, under this same pressure of light, be driven from one planet to another, from one so)ar system to another, and that it is in thia wise that sterile planets are fertilised aa soon as they have reached the evanescent stage of their evolution when conditions

of temperature make life possible upon them.''