Reading The Secrets Of The Skies

Southland Times, Issue 23025, 20 October 1936, Page 6

Reading The Secrets Of The Skies

The cable message from New York giving details of the huge telescope which is being constructed for the Mount Palomar observatory is a reminder of the amazing progress that has been made in the science of astronomy in the last 100 years. Assisted by generous grants from wealthy philanthropists, American observatories have been equipped with giant telescopes to search the heavens for the extension of man’s knowledge. Scarcely a year passes without an announcement that some new “world’s largest telescope” is being designed in America, and laymen are periodically staggered with a wealth of information about its magnitude. The lens takes two years to cool in the annealing oven and five years to be ground and polished; astronomers ride to their observation point in a cage; the human eye may look through the telescope into a million light years of space. Facts such as these induce in the layman a belief that astronomy is a transcendental science, dealing with infinite distances and with numbers beyond the human intellect to appreciate. But observatories have been founded for strictly practical purposes and perform a very valuable service to mankind. The Greenwich observatory, for instance, was established because of an actual need of the British nation, its primary purpose being for navigation. Studying the stars through a telescope is only a small part of the work of an observatory; but it is the most spectacular part, and in a country like the United States it is greatly emphasized. Some scientists hope to discover in the skies the secret of the universe; others are content if through their search they obtain a solid body of recorded data on which to study the secret. Lowell puts it this way: Though we cannot as yet review with the mind’s eye our past, we can, to an extent, foresee our future. We can with scientific con-

fidence look forward to a time when, each of the bodies composing our solar system shall turn an unchanging face in perpetuity to the sun. Each will then have reached the end of its evolution, set in the unchanging stare of death. Then the sun itself will go out, becoming a cold and lifeless mass; and the solar system will circle, ghostlike, in space awaiting only the resurrection of another cosmic catastrophe.

How far this can be reconciled with religious belief need not be argued here. Man’s thirst for knowledge will be quenched only by his extermination. He will continue to enlist the aid of science in reading the riddle of the universe, no matter how disconcerting the answer may be. Washington scientists propose to flash a “finger-printed” beam of light into the stratosphere so that they will be able to identify the various particles of the upper air. From what happens to light in the stratosphere will come the answer to several questions at present perplexing them. There are scientists who are confident that soon rockets carrying self-record-ing instruments will be shot into space and will flutter back to earth on parachutes or on rotating wings, giving man much valuable data about tho upper layers of the atmosphere. Mr H. G. Wells in “Things to Come” says that rockets will have been fired round the moon and back to earth with animals in them by 2036, and in that year the first human passengers will be sent to the moon. So swiftly has science moved in recent years that to deny the possibility of this is as foolish as to regard the construction of the giant telescope for Mount Palomar observatory as merely American ostentation.