The New Problems Of The Universe

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Title:     The New Problems Of The Universe
Author: Simon Newcomb [More Titles by Newcomb]

The achievements of the nineteenth century are still a theme of congratulation on the part of all who compare the present state of the world with that of one hundred years ago. And yet, if we should fancy the most sagacious prophet, endowed with a brilliant imagination, to have set forth in the year 1806 the problems that the century might solve and the things which it might do, we should be surprised to see how few of his predictions had come to pass. He might have fancied aerial navigation and a number of other triumphs of the same class, but he would hardly have had either steam navigation or the telegraph in his picture. In 1856 an article appeared in Harper's Magazine depicting some anticipated features of life in A.D. 3000. We have since made great advances, but they bear little resemblance to what the writer imagined. He did not dream of the telephone, but did describe much that has not yet come to pass and probably never will.

The fact is that, much as the nineteenth century has done, its last work was to amuse itself by setting forth more problems for this century to solve than it has ever itself succeeded in mastering. We should not be far wrong in saying that to-day there are more riddles in the universe than there were before men knew that it contained anything more than the objects they could see.

So far as mere material progress is concerned, it may be doubtful whether anything so epoch-making as the steam-engine or the telegraph is held in store for us by the future. But in the field of purely scientific discovery we are finding a crowd of things of which our philosophy did not dream even ten years ago.

The greatest riddles which the nineteenth century has bequeathed to us relate to subjects so widely separated as the structure of the universe and the structure of atoms of matter. We see more and more of these structures, and we see more and more of unity everywhere, and yet new facts difficult of explanation are being added more rapidly than old facts are being explained.

We all know that the nineteenth century was marked by a separation of the sciences into a vast number of specialties, to the subdivisions of which one could see no end. But the great work of the twentieth century will be to combine many of these specialties. The physical philosopher of the present time is directing his thought to the demonstration of the unity of creation. Astronomical and physical researches are now being united in a way which is bringing the infinitely great and the infinitely small into one field of knowledge. Ten years ago the atoms of matter, of which it takes millions of millions to make a drop of water, were the minutest objects with which science could imagine itself to be concerned, Now a body of experimentalists, prominent among whom stand Professors J. J. Thompson, Becquerel, and Roentgen, have demonstrated the existence of objects so minute that they find their way among and between the atoms of matter as rain-drops do among the buildings of a city. More wonderful yet, it seems likely, although it has not been demonstrated, that these little things, called "corpuscles," play an important part in what is going on among the stars. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that there do exist in the universe emanations of some sort, producing visible effects, the investigation of which the nineteenth century has had to bequeath to the twentieth.

For the purpose of the navigator, the direction of the magnetic needle is invariable in any one place, for months and even years; but when exact scientific observations on it are made, it is found subject to numerous slight changes. The most regular of these consists in a daily change of its direction. It moves one way from morning until noon, and then, late in the afternoon and during the night, turns back again to its original pointing. The laws of this change have been carefully studied from observations, which show that it is least at the equator and larger as we go north into middle latitudes; but no explanation of it resting on an indisputable basis has ever been offered.

Besides these regular changes, there are others of a very irregular character. Every now and then the changes in the direction of the magnet are wider and more rapid than those which occur regularly every day. The needle may move back and forth in a way so fitful as to show the action of some unusual exciting cause. Such movements of the needle are commonly seen when there is a brilliant aurora. This connection shows that a magnetic storm and an aurora must be due to the same or some connected causes.

Those of us who are acquainted with astronomical matters know that the number of spots on the sun goes through a regular cycle of change, having a period of eleven years and one or two months. Now, the curious fact is, when the number and violence of magnetic storms are recorded and compared, it is found that they correspond to the spots on the sun, and go through the same period of eleven years. The conclusion seems almost inevitable: magnetic storms are due to some emanation sent out by the sun, which arises from the same cause that produces the spots. This emanation does not go on incessantly, but only in an occasional way, as storms follow each other on the earth. What is it? Every attempt to detect it has been in vain. Professor Hale, at the Yerkes Observatory, has had in operation from time to time, for several years, his ingenious spectroheliograph, which photographs the sun by a single ray of the spectrum. This instrument shows that violent actions are going on in the sun, which ordinary observation would never lead us to suspect. But it has failed to show with certainty any peculiar emanation at the time of a magnetic storm or anything connected with such a storm.

A mystery which seems yet more impenetrable is associated with the so-called new stars which blaze forth from time to time. These offer to our sight the most astounding phenomena ever presented to the physical philosopher. One hundred years ago such objects offered no mystery. There was no reason to suppose that the Creator of the universe had ceased His functions; and, continuing them, it was perfectly natural that He should be making continual additions to the universe of stars. But the idea that these objects are really new creations, made out of nothing, is contrary to all our modern ideas and not in accord with the observed facts. Granting the possibility of a really new star--if such an object were created, it would be destined to take its place among the other stars as a permanent member of the universe. Instead of this, such objects invariably fade away after a few months, and are changed into something very like an ordinary nebula. A question of transcendent interest is that of the cause of these outbursts. It cannot be said that science has, up to the present time, been able to offer any suggestion not open to question. The most definite one is the collision theory, according to which the outburst is due to the clashing together of two stars, one or both of which might previously have been dark, like a planet. The stars which may be actually photographed probably exceed one hundred millions in number, and those which give too little light to affect the photographic plate may be vastly more numerous than those which do. Dark stars revolve around bright ones in an infinite variety of ways, and complex systems of bodies, the members of which powerfully attract each other, are the rule throughout the universe. Moreover, we can set no limit to the possible number of dark or invisible stars that may be flying through the celestial spaces. While, therefore, we cannot regard the theory of collision as established, it seems to be the only one yet put forth which can lay any claim to a scientific basis. What gives most color to it is the extreme suddenness with which the new stars, so far as has yet been observed, invariably blaze forth. In almost every case it has been only two or three days from the time that the existence of such an object became known until it had attained nearly its full brightness. In fact, it would seem that in the case of the star in Perseus, as in most other cases, the greater part of the outburst took place within the space of twenty-four hours. This suddenness and rapidity is exactly what would be the result of a collision.

The most inexplicable feature of all is the rapid formation of a nebula around this star. In the first photographs of the latter, the appearance presented is simply that of an ordinary star. But, in the course of three or four months, the delicate photographs taken at the Lick Observatory showed that a nebulous light surrounded the star, and was continually growing larger and larger. At first sight, there would seem to be nothing extraordinary in this fact. Great masses of intensely hot vapor, shining by their own light, would naturally be thrown out from the star. Or, if the star had originally been surrounded by a very rare nebulous fog or vapor, the latter would be seen by the brilliant light emitted by the star. On this was based an explanation offered by Kapteyn, which at first seemed very plausible. It was that the sudden wave of light thrown out by the star when it burst forth caused the illumination of the surrounding vapor, which, though really at rest, would seem to expand with the velocity of light, as the illumination reached more and more distant regions of the nebula. This result may be made the subject of exact calculation. The velocity of light is such as would make a circuit of the earth more than seven times in a second. It would, therefore, go out from the star at the rate of a million of miles in between five and six seconds. In the lapse of one of our days, the light would have filled a sphere around the star having a diameter more than one hundred and fifty times the distance of the sun from the earth, and more than five times the dimensions of the whole solar system. Continuing its course and enlarging its sphere day after day, the sight presented to us would have been that of a gradually expanding nebulous mass--a globe of faint light continually increasing in size with the velocity of light.

The first sentiment the reader will feel on this subject is doubtless one of surprise that the distance of the star should be so great as this explanation would imply. Six months after the explosion, the globe of light, as actually photographed, was of a size which would have been visible to the naked eye only as a very minute object in the sky. Is it possible that this minute object could have been thousands of times the dimensions of our solar system?

To see how the question stands from this point of view, we must have some idea of the possible distance of the new star. To gain this idea, we must find some way of estimating distances in the universe. For a reason which will soon be apparent, we begin with the greatest structure which nature offers to the view of man. We all know that the Milky Way is formed of countless stars, too minute to be individually visible to the naked eye. The more powerful the telescope through which we sweep the heavens, the greater the number of the stars that can be seen in it. With the powerful instruments which are now in use for photographing the sky, the number of stars brought to light must rise into the hundreds of millions, and the greater part of these belong to the Milky Way. The smaller the stars we count, the greater their comparative number in the region of the Milky Way. Of the stars visible through the telescope, more than one-half are found in the Milky Way, which may be regarded as a girdle spanning the entire visible universe.

Of the diameter of this girdle we can say, almost with certainty, that it must be more than a thousand times as great as the distance of the nearest fixed star from us, and is probably two or three times greater. According to the best judgment we can form, our solar system is situate near the central region of the girdle, so that the latter must be distant from us by half its diameter. It follows that if we can imagine a gigantic pair of compasses, of which the points extend from us to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, we should have to measure out at least five hundred spaces with the compass, and perhaps even one thousand or more, to reach the region of the Milky Way.

With this we have to connect another curious fact. Of eighteen new stars which have been observed to blaze forth during the last four hundred years, all are in the region of the Milky Way. This seems to show that, as a rule, they belong to the Milky Way. Accepting this very plausible conclusion, the new star in Perseus must have been more than five hundred times as far as the nearest fixed star. We know that it takes light four years to reach us from Alpha Centauri. It follows that the new star was at a distance through which light would require more than two thousand years to travel, and quite likely a time two or three times this. It requires only the most elementary ideas of geometry to see that if we suppose a ray of light to shoot from a star at such a distance in a direction perpendicular to the line of sight from us to the star, we can compute how fast the ray would seem to us to travel. Granting the distance to be only two thousand light years, the apparent size of the sphere around the star which the light would fill at the end of one year after the explosion would be that of a coin seen at a distance of two thousand times its radius, or one thousand times its diameter--say, a five-cent piece at the distance of sixty feet. But, as a matter of fact, the nebulous illumination expanded with a velocity from ten to twenty times as great as this.

The idea that the nebulosity around the new star was formed by the illumination caused by the light of the explosion spreading out on all sides therefore fails to satisfy us, not because the expansion of the nebula seemed to be so slow, but because it was many times as swift as the speed of light. Another reason for believing that it was not a mere wave of light is offered by the fact that it did not take place regularly in every direction from the star, but seemed to shoot off at various angles.

Up to the present time, the speed of light has been to science, as well as to the intelligence of our race, almost a symbol of the greatest of possible speeds. The more carefully we reflect on the case, the more clearly we shall see the difficulty in supposing any agency to travel at the rate of the seeming emanations from the new star in Perseus.

As the emanation is seen spreading day after day, the reader may inquire whether this is not an appearance due to some other cause than the mere motion of light. May not an explosion taking place in the centre of a star produce an effect which shall travel yet faster than light? We can only reply that no such agency is known to science.

But is there really anything intrinsically improbable in an agency travelling with a speed many times that of light? In considering that there is, we may fall into an error very much like that into which our predecessors fell in thinking it entirely out of the range of reasonable probability that the stars should be placed at such distances as we now know them to be.

Accepting it as a fact that agencies do exist which travel from sun to planet and from star to star with a speed which beggars all our previous ideas, the first question that arises is that of their nature and mode of action. This question is, up to the present time, one which we do not see any way of completely answering. The first difficulty is that we have no evidence of these agents except that afforded by their action. We see that the sun goes through a regular course of pulsations, each requiring eleven years for completion; and we see that, simultaneously with these, the earth's magnetism goes through a similar course of pulsations. The connection of the two, therefore, seems absolutely proven. But when we ask by what agency it is possible for the sun to affect the magnetism of the earth, and when we trace the passage of some agent between the two bodies, we find nothing to explain the action. To all appearance, the space between the earth and the sun is a perfect void. That electricity cannot of itself pass through a vacuum seems to be a well-established law of physics. It is true that electromagnetic waves, which are supposed to be of the same nature with those of light, and which are used in wireless telegraphy, do pass through a vacuum and may pass from the sun to the earth. But there is no way of explaining how such waves would either produce or affect the magnetism of the earth.

The mysterious emanations from various substances, under certain conditions, may have an intimate relation with yet another of the mysteries of the universe. It is a fundamental law of the universe that when a body emits light or heat, or anything capable of being transformed into light or heat, it can do so only by the expenditure of force, limited in supply. The sun and stars are continually sending out a flood of heat. They are exhausting the internal supply of something which must be limited in extent. Whence comes the supply? How is the heat of the sun kept up? If it were a hot body cooling off, a very few years would suffice for it to cool off so far that its surface would become solid and very soon cold. In recent years, the theory universally accepted has been that the supply of heat is kept up by the continual contraction of the sun, by mutual gravitation of its parts as it cools off. This theory has the advantage of enabling us to calculate, with some approximation to exactness, at what rate the sun must be contracting in order to keep up the supply of heat which it radiates. On this theory, it must, ten millions of years ago, have had twice its present diameter, while less than twenty millions of years ago it could not have existed except as an immense nebula filling the whole solar system. We must bear in mind that this theory is the only one which accounts for the supply of heat, even through human history. If it be true, then the sun, earth, and solar system must be less than twenty million years old.

Here the geologists step in and tell us that this conclusion is wholly inadmissible. The study of the strata of the earth and of many other geological phenomena, they assure us, makes it certain that the earth must have existed much in its present condition for hundreds of millions of years. During all that time there can have been no great diminution in the supply of heat radiated by the sun.

The astronomer, in considering this argument, has to admit that he finds a similar difficulty in connection with the stars and nebulas. It is an impossibility to regard these objects as new; they must be as old as the universe itself. They radiate heat and light year after year. In all probability, they must have been doing so for millions of years. Whence comes the supply? The geologist may well claim that until the astronomer explains this mystery in his own domain, he cannot declare the conclusions of geology as to the age of the earth to be wholly inadmissible.

Now, the scientific experiments of the last two years have brought this mystery of the celestial spaces right down into our earthly laboratories. M. and Madame Curie have discovered the singular metal radium, which seems to send out light, heat, and other rays incessantly, without, so far as has yet been determined, drawing the required energy from any outward source. As we have already pointed out, such an emanation must come from some storehouse of energy. Is the storehouse, then, in the medium itself, or does the latter draw it from surrounding objects? If it does, it must abstract heat from these objects. This question has been settled by Professor Dewar, at the Royal Institution, London, by placing the radium in a medium next to the coldest that art has yet produced--liquid air. The latter is surrounded by the only yet colder medium, liquid hydrogen, so that no heat can reach it. Under these circumstances, the radium still gives out heat, boiling away the liquid air until the latter has entirely disappeared. Instead of the radiation diminishing with time, it rather seems to increase.

Called on to explain all this, science can only say that a molecular change must be going on in the radium, to correspond to the heat it gives out. What that change may be is still a complete mystery. It is a mystery which we find alike in those minute specimens of the rarest of substances under our microscopes, in the sun, and in the vast nebulous masses in the midst of which our whole solar system would be but a speck. The unravelling of this mystery must be the great work of science of the twentieth century. What results shall follow for mankind one cannot say, any more than he could have said two hundred years ago what modern science would bring forth. Perhaps, before future developments, all the boasted achievements of the nineteenth century may take the modest place which we now assign to the science of the eighteenth century--that of the infant which is to grow into a man.

[The end]
Simon Newcomb's essay: New Problems Of The Universe

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