Books: Marvels of Modern Science
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Paul Severing >> Marvels of Modern Science
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It is vain to pursue farther the unthinkable vastness of the visible
Universe; as for the invisible it is equally useless for even
imagination to try to grapple with its never-ending immensity, to
endeavor to penetrate its awful clouded mystery forever veiled from
human view.
In all there are about 3,000 stars visible to the naked eye in each
hemisphere. A three-inch pocket telescope brings about one million
into view. The grand and scientifically perfected instruments of our
great observatories show incalculable multitudes. Every improvement
in light-grasping power brings millions of new stars into the range
of instrumental vision and shows the "background" of the sky blazing
with the light of eye-invisible suns too far away to be separately
distinguished.
Great strides are daily being made in stellar photography. Plates are
now being attached to the telescopic apparatus whereby luminous heavenly
bodies are able to impress their own pictures. Groups of stars are
being photographed on one plate. Complete sets of these star photographs
are being taken every year, embracing every nook and corner of the
celestial sphere and these are carefully compared with one another to
find out what changes are going on in the heavens. It will not be long
before every star photographically visible to the most powerful
telescope will have its present position accurately defined on these
photographic charts.
When, the sensitized plate is exposed for a considerable time even
invisible stars photograph themselves, and in this way a great number
of stars have been discovered which no telescope, however powerful,
can bring within the range of vision. Tens of thousands of stars have
registered themselves thus on a single plate, and on one occasion an
impression was obtained on one plate of more than 400,000.
Astronomers are of the opinion that for every star visible to the naked
eye there are more than 50,000 visible to the camera of the telescope.
If this is so, then the number of visible stars exceeds 300,000,000
(three hundred millions).
But the picture taking power of the finest photographic lens has a
limit; no matter how long the exposure, it cannot penetrate beyond a
certain boundary into the vastness of space, and beyond its limits as
George Sterling, the Californian poet, says are--
"fires of unrecorded suns
That light a heaven not our own."
What is the limit? Answer philosopher, answer sage, answer astronomer,
and we have the solution of "the riddle of the Universe."
As yet the riddle still remains, the veil still hangs between the
knowable and the unknowable, between the finite and the infinite.
Science stands baffled like a wailing creature outside the walls of
knowledge importuning for admission. There is little, in truth no hope
at all, that she will ever be allowed to enter, survey all the fields
of space and set a limit to their boundaries.
Although the riddle of the universe still remains unsolved because
unsolvable, no one can deny that Astronomy has made mighty strides
forward during the past few years. What has been termed the "Old
Astronomy," which concerns itself with the determination of the
positions and motions of the heavenly bodies, has been rejuvenated and
an immense amount of work has been accomplished by concerted effort,
as well as by individual exertions.
The greatest achievements have been the accurate determination of the
positions of the fixed stars visible to the eye. Their situation is
now estimated with as unerring precision as is that of the planets of
our own system. Millions upon millions of stars have been photographed
and these photographs will be invaluable in determining the future
changes and motions of these giant suns of interstellar space.
Of our own system we now know definitely the laws governing it. Fifty
years ago much of our solar machinery was misunderstood and many things
were enveloped in mystery which since has been made very plain. The
spectroscope has had a wonderful part in astronomical research. It
first revealed the nature of the gases existing in the sun. It next
enabled us to study the prominences on any clear day. Then by using
it in the spectro-heliograph we have been enabled to photograph the
entire visible surface of the sun, together with the prominences at
one time. Through the spectro-heliograph we know much more about what
the central body of our system is doing than our theories can explain.
Fresh observations are continually bringing to light new facts which
must soon be accounted for by laws at present unknown.
Spectroscopic observations are by no means confined to the sun. By
them we now study the composition of the atmospheres of the other
planets; through them the presence of chemical elements known on the
earth is detected in vagrant comets, far-distant stars and dimly-shining
nebulae. The spectroscope also makes it possible to measure the
velocities of objects which are approaching or receding from us. For
instance we know positively that the bright star called Aldebaran near
the constellation of the Pleiades is retreating from us at a rate of
almost two thousand miles a minute. The greatest telescopes in the
world are now being trained on stars that are rushing away towards the
"furthermost" of space and in this way astronomers are trying to get
definite knowledge as to the actual velocity with which the celestial
bodies are speeding.
It is only within the past few years that photography has been applied
to astronomical development. In this connection, more accurate results
are obtained by measuring the photographs of stellar spectra than by
measuring the spectra themselves. Photography with modern rapid plates
gives us, with a given telescope, pictures of objects so faint that
no visual telescope of the same size will reveal them. It is in this
way that many of the invisible stars have impressed themselves upon
exposed plates and given us a vague idea of the immensity in number
of those stars which we cannot view with eye or instrument.
Though we have made great advancement, there are many problems yet
even in regard to our own little system of sun worlds which clamor
loudly for solution. The sun himself represents a crowd of pending
problems. His peculiar mode of rotation; the level of sunspots; the
constitution of the photospheric cloud-shell, its relation to faculae
which rise from it, and to the surmounting vaporous strata; the nature
of the prominences; the alternations of coronal types; the affinities
of the zodiacal light--all await investigation.
A great telescope has recently shown that one star in eighteen on the
average is a visual double--is composed of two suns in slow revolution
around their common center of mass. The spectroscope using the
photographic plate, has established within the last decade that one
star in every five or six on the average is attended by a companion
so near to it as to remain invisible in the most powerful telescopes,
and so massive as to swing the visible star around in an elliptic
orbit.
The photography of comets, nebulae and solar coronas has made the study
of these phenomena incomparably more effective than the old visual
methods. There is no longer any necessity to make "drawings" of them.
The old dread of comets has been relegated into the shade of ignorance.
The long switching tails regarded so ominously and from which were
anticipated such dire calamities as the destruction of worlds into
chaos have been proven to be composed of gaseous vapors of no more
solidity than the "airy nothingness of dreams."
The earth in the circle of its orbit passed through the tail of Halley's
comet in May, 1910, and we hadn't even a pyrotechnical display of fire
rockets to celebrate the occasion. In fact there was not a single
celestial indication of the passage and we would not have known only
for the calculations of the astronomer. The passing of a comet now,
as far as fear is concerned, means no more, in fact not as much, as
the passing of an automobile.
Science no doubt has made wonderful strides in our time, but far as
it has gone, it has but opened for us the first few pages of the book
of the heavens--the last pages of which no man shall ever read. For
aeons upon aeons of time, worlds and suns, and systems of worlds and
suns, revolved through the infinity of space, before man made his
appearance on the tiny molecule of matter we call the earth, and for
aeons upon aeons, for eternity upon eternity, worlds and suns shall
continue to roll and revolve after the last vestige of man shall have
disappeared, nay after the atoms of earth and sun and all his attending
planets of our system shall have amalgamated themselves with other
systems in the boundlessness of space; destroyed, obliterated,
annihilated, they shall never be, for matter is indestructible. When
it passes from one form it enters another; the dead animal that is
cast into the earth lives again in the trees and shrubs and flowers
and grasses that grow in the earth above where its body was cast. Our
earth shall die in course of time, that is, its particles will pass
into other compositions and it will be so of the other planets, of the
suns, of the stars themselves, for as soon as the old ones die there
will ever be new forms to which to attach themselves and thus the
process of world development shall go on forever.
The nebulae which astronomers discover throughout the stellar space
are extended masses of glowing gases of different forms and are worlds
in process of formation. Such was the earth once. These gases solidify
and contract and cool off until finally an inhabited world, inhabited
by some kind of creatures, takes its place in the whirling galaxy of
systems.
The stars which appear to us in a yellow or whitish yellow light are
in the heyday of their existence, while those that present a red haze
are almost burnt out and will soon become blackened, dead things
disintegrating and crumbling and spreading their particles throughout
space. It is supposed this little earth of ours has a few more million
years to live, so we need not fear for our personal safety while in
mortal form.
To us ordinary mortals the mystery as well as the majesty of the heavens
have the same wonderful attraction as they had for the first of our
race. Thousands of years ago the black-bearded shepherds of Eastern
lands gazed nightly into the vaulted dome and were struck with awe as
well as wonder in the contemplation of the glittering specks which
appeared no larger than the pebbles beneath their feet.
We in our time as we gaze with unaided eye up at the mighty disk of
the so called Milky Way, no longer regard the scintillating points
glittering like diamonds in a jeweler's show-case, with feelings of
awe, but the wonder is still upon us, wonder at the immensity of the
works of Him who built the earth and sky, who, "throned in height
sublime, sits amid the cherubim," King of the Universe, King of kings
and Lord of lords. With a deep faith we look up and adore, then
reverently exclaim,--"Lord, God! wonderful are the works of Thy Hands."
CHAPTER XVI
CAN WE COMMUNICATE WITH OTHER WORLDS?
Vastness of Nature--Star Distances--Problem of Communicating with
Mars--The Great Beyond.
A story is told of a young lady who had just graduated from boarding
school with high honors. Coming home in great glee, she cast her books
aside as she announced to her friends;--"Thank goodness it is all over,
I have nothing more to learn. I know Latin and Greek, French and German,
Spanish and Italian; I have gone through Algebra, Geometry,
Trigonometry, Conic Sections and the Calculus; I can interpret Beethoven
and Wagner, and--but why enumerate?--in short, '_I know everything_.'"
As she was thus proclaiming her knowledge her hoary-headed grandfather,
a man whom the Universities of the world had honored by affixing a
score of alphabetical letters to his name, was experimenting in his
laboratory. The lines of long and deep study had corrugated his brow
and furrowed his face. Wearily he bent over his retorts and test tubes.
At length he turned away with a heavy sigh, threw up his hands and
despairingly exclaimed,--"Alas, alas! after fifty years of study and
investigation, I find _I know nothing_."
There is a moral in this story that he who runs may read. Most of us
are like the young lady,--in the pride of our ignorance, we fancy we
know almost everything. We boast of the progress of our time, of what
has been accomplished in our modern world, we proclaim our triumphs
from the hilltops,--"Ha!" we shout, "we have annihilated time and
distance; we have conquered the forces of nature and made them
subservient to our will; we have chained the lightning and imprisoned
the thunder; we have wandered through the fields of space and measured
the dimensions and revolutions of stars and suns and planets and
systems. We have opened the eternal gates of knowledge for all to enter
and crowned man king of the universe."
Vain boasting! The gates of knowledge have been opened, but we have
merely got a peep at what lies within. And man, so far from being king
of the universe, is but as a speck on the fly-wheel that controls the
mighty machinery of creation. What we know is infinitesimal to what
we do not know. We have delved in the fields of science, but as yet
our ploughshares have merely scratched the tiniest portion of the
surface,--the furrow that lies in the distance is unending. In the
infinite book of knowledge we have just turned over a few of the first
pages; but as it is infinite, alas! we can never hope to reach the
final page, for there is no final page. What we have accomplished is
but as a mere drop in the ocean, whose waves wash the continents of
eternity. No scholar, no scientist can bound those continents, can
tell the limits to which they stretch, inasmuch as they are illimitable.
Ask the most learned _savant_ if he can fix the boundaries of space, and
he will answer,--No! Ask him if he can define _mind_ and _matter_, and
you will receive the same answer.
"What is mind? It is no matter."
"What is matter? Never mind."
The atom formerly thought to be indivisible and the smallest particle
of matter has been reduced to molecules, corpuscles, ions, and
electrons; but the nature, the primal cause of these, the greatest
scientists on earth are unable to determine. Learning is as helpless
as ignorance when brought up against this stone-wall of mystery.
_The effect_ is seen, but the _cause_ remains indeterminable. The
scientist, gray-haired in experience and experiment, knows no more
in this regard than the prattling child at its mother's knee. The child
asks,--"Who made the world?" and the mother answers, "God made the
world." The infant mind, suggestive of the future craving for knowledge,
immediately asks,--"Who is God?" Question of questions to which the
philosopher and the peasant must give the same answer,--"God is the
infinite, the eternal, the source of all things, the _alpha_ and
_omega_ of creation, from Him all came, to Him all must return."
He is the beginning of Science, the foundation on which our edifice
of knowledge rests.
We hear of the conflict between Science and Religion. There is no
conflict, can be none, for all Science must be based on faith,--faith
in Him who holds worlds and suns "in the hollow of His hand." All our
great scientists have been deeply religious men, acknowledging their
own insignificance before Him who fills the universe with His presence.
What is the universe and what place do we hold in it? The mind of man
becomes appalled in consideration of the question. The orb we know as
the sun is centre of a system of worlds of which our earth is almost
the most insignificant; yet great as is the sun when compared to the
little bit of matter on which we dwell and have our being, it is itself
but a mote, as it were, in the beam of the Universe. Formerly this sun
was thought to be fixed and immovable, but the progress of science
demonstrated that while the earth moves around this luminary, the
latter is moving with mighty velocity in an orbit of its own. Tis the
same with all the other bodies which we erroneously call "fixed stars."
These stars are the suns of other systems of worlds, countless systems,
all rushing through the immensity of space, for there is nothing fixed
or stationary in creation,--all is movement, constant, unvarying. Suns
and stars and systems perform their revolutions with unerring precision,
each unit-world true to its own course, thus proving to the soul of
reason and the consciousness of faith that there must needs be an
omnipotent hand at the lever of this grand machinery of the universe,
the hand that fashioned it, that of God. Addison beautifully expresses
the idea in referring to the revolutions of the stars:
"In reason's ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth one glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine-
'The Hand that made us is Divine.'"
Our sun, the centre of the small system of worlds of which the earth
is one, is distant from us about ninety-three million miles. In winter
it is nearer; in summer farther off. Light travels this distance in
about eight minutes, to be exact, the rate is 186,400 miles per second.
To get an idea of the immensity of the distance of the so-called fixed
stars, let us take this as a base of comparison. The nearest fixed
star to us is _Alpha Centauri_, which is one of the brightest as
seen in the southern heavens. It requires four and one-quarter years
for a beam of light to travel from this star to earth at the rate of
186,000 miles a second, thus showing that Alpha Centauri is about two
hundred and seventy-five thousand times as far from us as is the sun,
in other words, more than 25,575,000,000,000 miles, which, expressed
in our notation, reads twenty-five trillion, five hundred and seventy-
five billion miles, a number which the mind of man is incapable of
grasping. To use the old familiar illustration of the express train,
it would take the "Twentieth Century Limited," which does the thousand
mile trip between New York and Chicago in less than twenty-four hours,
some one million two hundred and fifty thousand years at the same speed
to travel from the earth to _Alpha Centauri_. _Sirius_, the Dog-Star, is
twice as far away, something like eight or nine "light" years from our
solar system; the Pole-Star is forty-eight "light" years removed from
us, and so on with the rest, to an infinity of numbers. From the dawn of
creation in the eternal cosmos of matter, light has been travelling from
some stars in the infinitude of space at the rate of 186,000 miles per
second, but so remote are they from our system that it has not reached
us as yet. The contemplation is bewildering; the mind sinks into
nothingness in consideration of a magnitude so great and distance so
confusing. What lies beyond?--a region which numbers cannot measure and
thought cannot span, and beyond that?--the eternal answer,--GOD.
In face of the contemplation of the vastness of creation, of its
boundlessness the question ever obtrudes itself,--What place have we
mortals in the universal cosmos? What place have we finite creatures,
who inhabit this speck of matter we call the earth, in this mighty
scheme of suns and systems and never-ending space. Does the Creator
of all think us the most important of his works, that we should be the
particular objects of revelation, that for us especially heaven was
built, and a God-man, the Son of the Eternal, came down to take flesh
of our flesh and live among us, to show us the way, and finally to
offer himself as a victim to the Father to expiate our transgressions.
Mystery of mysteries before which we stand appalled and lost in wonder.
Self-styled rationalists love to point out the irrationality and
absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all the unimaginable vastness
of suns and systems, filling for all we know endless space, should
take any special interest in so mean and pitiful a creature as man,
inhabiting such an infinitesimal speck of matter as the earth, which
depends for its very life and light upon a second or third-rate or
hundred-rate Sun.
From the earliest times of our era, the sneers and taunts of atheism
and agnosticism have been directed at the humble believer, who bows
down in submission and questions not. The fathers of the Church, such
as Augustine and Chrysostom and Thomas of Aquinas and, at a later time,
Luther, and Calvin, and Knox, and Newman, despite the war of creeds,
have attacked the citadel of the scoffers; but still the latter hurl
their javelins from the ramparts, battlements and parapets and refuse
to be repulsed. If there are myriads of other worlds, thousands,
millions of them in point of magnitude greater than ours, what concern
say they has the Creator with our little atom of matter? Are other
worlds inhabited besides our own. This is the question that will not
down--that is always begging for an answer. The most learned savants
of modern time, scholars, sages, philosophers and scientists have given
it their attention, but as yet no one has been able to conclusively
decide whether a race of intelligent beings exists in any sphere other
than our own. All efforts to determine the matter result in mere
surmise, conjecture and guesswork. The best of scientists can only put
forward an opinion.
Professor Simon Newcomb, one of the most brilliant minds our country
has produced, says: "It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that beings,
not only animated but endowed with reason, inhabit countless worlds
in space." Professor Mitchell of the Cincinnati Observatory, in his
work, "Popular Astronomy," says,--"It is most incredible to assert,
as so many do, that our planet, so small and insignificant in its
proportions when compared with the planets with which it is allied,
is the only world in the whole universe filled with sentient, rational,
and intelligent beings capable of comprehending the grand mysteries
of the physical universe." Camille Flammarion, in referring to the
utter insignificance of the earth in the immensity of space, puts
forward his view thus: "If advancing with the velocity of light we
could traverse from century to century the unlimited number of suns
and spheres without ever meeting any limit to the prodigious immensity
where God brings forth his worlds, and looking behind, knowing not in
what part of the infinite was the little grain of dust called the
earth, we would be compelled to unite our voices with that universal
nature and exclaim--'Almighty God, how senseless were we to believe
that there was nothing beyond the earth and that our abode alone
possessed the privilege of reflecting Thy greatness and honor.'"
The most distinguished astronomers and scientists of a past time, as
well as many of the most famous divines, supported the contention of
world life beyond the earth. Among these may be mentioned Kepler and
Tycho, Giordano Bruno and Cardinal Cusa, Sir William and Sir John
Herschel, Dr. Bentley and Dr. Chalmers, and even Newton himself
subscribed in great measure to the belief that the planets and stars
are inhabited by intelligent beings.
Those who deny the possibility of other worlds being inhabited, endeavor
to show that our position in the universe is unique, that our solar
system is quite different from all others, and, to crown the argument,
they assert that our little world has just the right amount of water,
air, and gravitational force to enable it to be the abode of intelligent
life, whereas elsewhere, such conditions do not prevail, and that on
no other sphere can such physical habitudes be found as will enable
life to originate or to exist. It can be easily shown that such
reasoning is based on untenable foundations. Other worlds have to go
through processes of evolution, and there can be no doubt that many
are in a state similar to our own. It required hundreds of thousands,
perhaps hundreds of millions of years, before this earth was fit to
sustain human life. The same transitions which took place on earth are
taking place in other planets of our system, and other systems, and
it is but reasonable to assume that in other systems there are much
older worlds than the earth, and that these have arrived at a more
developed state of existence, and therefore have a life much higher
than our own. As far as physical conditions are concerned, there are
suns similar to our own, as revealed by the spectroscope, and which
have the same eruptive energy. Astronomical Science has incontrovertibly
demonstrated, and evidence is continually increasing to show that dark,
opaque worlds like ours exist and revolve around their primaries. Why
should not these worlds be inhabited by a race equal or even superior
in intelligence to ourselves, according to their place in the cosmos
of creation?
Leaving out of the question the outlying worlds of space, let us come
to a consideration of the nearest celestial neighbor we have in our
own system, the planet Mars: Is there rational life on Mars and if so
can we communicate with the inhabitants?
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