CONCERNING STARS

Taranaki Daily News, 19 August 1933, Page 13 (Supplement)

CONCERNING STARS

SOME RECENT SAYINGS

GBy

Rev. B. Dudley, F.R.A.S.)

Not infrequently one meets with sayings concerning the heavenly bodies by wise and understanding people ' which deserve a much wider audience than is given them. One feels that these ought to be passed on to others. In a day when astronomy has come to its own and there exists a popular interest in “nature over our heads” this is especially the case. Culled from various sources, the following will be of interest to some readers: —

The All But Dead Scientist. “I am of the opinion that all the finer speculations in the realm of science spring from a deep religious feeling and that without such feeling they would be utterly barren.” It is some months ago since Einstein made public the above statement More recently he has said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the sense of the mysterious; that sense is the source of all true art and all true science, and the scientist or artist to whom it is alien, who can no longer contemplate in awe, whq has lost the capacity to pause in wonder, is all but dead.” This recalls a sentence uttered a short time ago by John Langdon-Davies, who . cannot. be accused of fundamentalism in religion, that “the whole history of science has been a direct search for God,” and who goes on to show how that search was deliberate and conscious until well into the 18th century, and since then unconscious for the most part. The chief incentive in working at all was,, he thinks, a desire to know God. An intimate knowledge of the lives of men like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and Leibnitz shows that he is right: the key to their activities was their unquenchable thirst for religious truth. And. while during a large part of the Victorian era science worked independently of religion; now, in this 20th century, it find.? itself again and again stumbling, as it were, upon religion. The old, acquired antagonism to religion has completely vanished. Science does not interpret God as “an irritable old gentleman believing in corporal punishment,” but is paving the way for a conception of the Power—the mind—behind all things.

Map of the Universe. Sir Herbert Samuel in his presidential address before the British Institute of Philosophy described how he contemplated thd making of a map of the universe to the scale of lin. to 100,000,000 miles, but was obliged at once to abandon the idea. “That is,” he stated, “a little more than the distance from the earth to the sun; an aeroplane travelling at the rate of 100 miles an hour without stopping would take more than a century to traverse it.” If that distance, he continued, vzere represented by one inch, “the width of one map, if we were to include-the most distant galaxies of stars so far discovered, would have to be nearly 300,000,000 miles; the map would have to stretch from the earth to the sun and back again and back to the sun once again.” This is agreeable with wliat Sir Leonard Hill wrote a short time ago: “The number of the stars is sue]? that if stars were grains of sand, the grains would cover the whole of England hundreds of yards deep.” One earth, he went on, is the one-millionth part of one such grain, and we bother ourselves over questions of social rank! He reminds us, however, that the importance of things does not lie in the simple matter of size. Nature has no regard for our standards of great and small. Her work is carried on just ,as easily in the immense as in the infinitesimal.' “To attach importance to mere, astronomical size,” Sir Leonard suggests, “is a kind of cosmic snobbery; it is like the vulgarism of the museum guide who expects you to admire a table because it is the largest in Europe, or a-picture because it cost £50,000.” The value of any and everything lies in its moral, spiritual and relative significance. It is easy to be deceived by what has been called mere Jumboism. Where Light Rays Fall Back.

According to the modem theory of gravitation, states Sir Arthur S. Eddington, a globe the size of Betelgeuse—a well-known Orion star—and having the same mean density as the sun would have some remarkable properties. “Owing to the great intensity of its gravitation, light would be unable to escape; and any rays shot out would fall back again to the star by their own weight.” Mass, he adds, produces a curvature, of space, and in this case the curvature would be so great that “space would close up round the star, leaving us outside, that is to say, nowhere.” Betelgeuse is much larger than the entire orbit of the earth about the sun. Its matter is about a millionth part as dense as water.

The Emptiness of an Atom. Readers will be familiar with the comparison drawn between the atom and the solar system. Could wc examine an atom enlarged to a size permitting us to see it in detail, we should find a central particle, and situated at proportionately vast distances from this, and circulating round it, a number of other tiny particles. A writer of popular science says that “the chair on which the reader sits is in reality much more like the Irishman’s definition of a net, a number of holes tied together with pieces of string; only it would be necessary to imagine the strings cut away until only the knots were left.” This is true not only of the reader’s chair, he adds; it is likewise true of the reader himself: “He is emptiness punctuated with a multitude of lonely and isolated dots; and if the dots could be squeezed together and the emptiness removed the whole world would be reduced to the size of an orange.” The Creative Power.

Dr. George Ellery Hale, in his latest volume which, though having a somewhat fanqiful title (Signals From the Stars), is strictly scientific, illustrates how there has arisen in our times as a result of astronomical research work “a new and vast conception of an ordered cosmos, involving the countless spiral nebulae far beyond our own galactic island, in which the solar system is as a grain of sand.” In this conception, he states, we may glimpse the imprint of a Creator, infinitely above the tribal deities of early man, whose immutable laws it is our first duty and greatest advantage to discover and to obey.” This better conception is one of the signals from starry space, which, according to the author, are of the utmost importance to mankind. .