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Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 121, 14 January 1932, Page 2

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SQMBRE DRAMA AS SEEN ' BY THE OTHER PLANETS. * _ j f SWELLING LIKE A BUBBLE. Like the baseless fabric of thi/3 vision,. Tha ■/•It.ud-capped towers, the1 giorgeous ivslacos, ; . , The poleaui lemples, the great globe itself,' Yea, all wliich it inherit, shall dislsolve, And like this in.substantial pageant faded, Licave not a wrack behind. , — Prospero, in "The ;Tempest." The sombre drama of the eiidf of th'e world as it may ultimately be, viewed' by S'-.me spectator in anotlier'; plangt was pletured by Sir Arthur Addington," the astronomer, says the Daily Telegraph. . : He was delivering his presidential address to the Physical Society in the Imperial College of Science and Technology, South Kensington. ; "The theory of the expanding universe might also be called th,e theory of the shrinking atom," Sir Arthur said. "Let us take the view of a eosmic being. Watching us for; some few thousand million years he sees us gradually shrinking; atoms, animals, plants, even the galaxies, all share the same contraction; only the intergalactic spaces remains the same. The earth spirals round the sun in an ever-increasing orbit. "We walk the stage of life, performers of a drama for the benefit of the cosmic spectator. As the scenes proceed he notices that the ac-* tors are growing smaller and the ac- : tion growing quicker. 'When the last act bpens the cur- : tain rises on midget actors rushing ; thrcugh their parts at frantic speed. ; Smaller and smaller. Faster and faster. One last microscopic blur of

intense agitation. "And then nothing." Like a Bubble. Sir Arthur deelared that the material universe was swelling up like a bub. le. - . "iloreover," he said, "it is swelling up at a rate which, if not alarming t » i re vciinary citizen, is very disturblng to theorists. In the time which has elapsed since the oldest terreStrial rocks were forihed the radius of the universe has become doubled. "The simile of a bubble may suggest danger, for when bubbles expand too much, they burst. On this point at least , I can spealc reassuringly. Our bubble oi' a universe is not going to burst — for the best of reasons. It burst quite a long time ago. "Up to the farthest limits surveyed by our telescopes, space is dotted with numerous islands — the spiral nebulae. They are so far apart that

light takes about a million years to cross from one island to the next. Each island turns out to be a galaxy of stars. "The most striking thing is, that the galaxies are, with. remarkahle unanimity, going away from us. More than eighty have been observed to be movng outwards, and not one has been found eoming in to take their place. "It is an obvious" inference that in the course of time the region will be evacuated. The nebulae will all be out of reach of our telescopes unless we increase our telescopic power to keep pace. I find that an observer of nebulae will have tb double the aperture of his telescope every 1,300,000,000 years merely to keep pace with their recession. "Sir James Jeans delights in telling us that we have billions of years before us in which to find out all that can be found out about the universe. 1 suggest, however, that there is urgency as regards the spiral nebulae; if we leave it too late, there will be none left to examine."