WONDER OF THE UNIVERSE.

Putaruru Press, Volume VI, Issue 238, 24 May 1928, Page 5

WONDER OF THE UNIVERSE.

Astonishing figures illustrating the age of the earth, the size of the universe, and the radiotion of energy from the stars were given by Dr J. H. Jeans, secretary of the Royal Society, in the course of a lecture given in London recently. Among the most remarkable of his computations were the following:— The life in front of the human race so enormously exceeds the life behind it that humanity must be regarded as a three-days’ old infant who has yet to reach three score years and ten. So numerous are the stars in the universe that the same number of grains of sand spread over England would make a layer hundreds of yards in depth. Our earth is one millionth part of one such grain of sand. The heaviest stars are so densely packed that a handful of their matter would weigh about ten tons. Energy radiated from each square inch of the sun’s surface is sufficient to keep a 50-h.p. engine continuouosly in motion. Illustrating the amount of energy made available by radiation, Dr Jeans said that the annihilation of a pound of coal a week would produce as much energy as the combustion of the five million tons a week which are mined in the British Isles. A single drop of oil would take the Mauretannia across the Atlantic. The total age of the earth far exceeded the 300,000 years or so of man’s existence; it must be something like 2,000 million years. A million million years hence, so far as we can foresee, the sun will still be much as now, and the earth will be revolving around it much as now. The year will be a little longer, and the climate quite a lot colder, while accumulated stores of coals, oil, and forest will have long been burnt up; but there is no reason why our descendants should not still people the earth. Perhaps it may be unable to support so large a population as now ar.d perhaps fewer will desire to live on it. On the other hand, mankind, being three million times as old as now, may—if the conjecture does distress our pessimists too much— be three million times as wise. Radiation of energy is annihilating the sun’s mass at the rate of 250,000,000 tons a minute. As the sun has no source of replenishment it mu«t weigh 360,000,000,000 tons less to-day than it did yesterday. Of each ton it had at birth only a few hundred-weights at most remain to-day. The radiation of the stars imposes an endlessly recurring capital levy on their masses. Thus observations and theory agree in indicating that the universe is melting away into radiation. Our position is that of the Polar bears on an iceberg that has broken loose from an icepack surrounding the Pole, and is inexorably melting away as the iceberg drifts to warmer latitudes and ultimate extinction.