Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1929-11-23

Sucn Is the picture OF man pld
report of the Smithsonian Institution b,
secretary of the Royal Society Of Great
Jeans pictures man as just beginning
to peer over the edge of his cradle, and
concludes his picture of life, space and
time with the astonishing statement:
THE picture it sees may be merely
creation of its own mind, in which moth
ing really exists except itself. The uni
verse which we study with such care
may be dream, and we brain cells IN
the mind of the dreamer"
Man, he declares, has existed at the
most about 800 900 years on a planet
about 2,000,0O0,000 years old, with every
likelihood that conditions still will be
suitable for human life million million
years hence, although the years will be
longer and the climate colder. A very
gloomy view of the future, he says, would
give man a life span Of 100000, 900
years.
Looks Through Giant Telescopes.
From this cradle. he says. the infant
race looks out through its newly discov-
cred giant telescopes for approximately
$4,000, 900 900, 900 900 miles, which has
been calculated. according to the Elm
stein theory as about l,000th part OF
the total depth of space. beyond which
there Is neither space nor time.
The sun, he points out. is equal to a
million earths, but itself Is probably only
one of approximately 100000 0O,O 900
larger and smaller stars in its own i'm
mediate family to say nothing OF other
millions of such familieS-the recently
discovered so-called island universes."
The largest star. Betelgeuse, he says. is
so great that $4,000 900 suns could be
packed inside of it; the brightest, s.
Doradus, emits 100000 times as much
light, and the faintest, Van Maanens
star, is only about the size Of the earth
itself
Comparing the progress Of groups of
bright stars like the Great Bear and the
PleiadeS to the flight of swans through
a confused crowd of rocks and starlings.
Jeans deduces from the degree in which
the orderly arrangement has been
broken up the enormous age OF the uni
verse.
Sun Has Lost Most Of Mass.
The sun, he says, is pouring forth
every "a hours $50, 900 600, 900 tons OF
its substance into space In the form of
light. so that it already has lost most
of the mass it had at its birth, $780,
600, 100000 years ago. Our position"
he says, "is that of polar bears on an
iceberg that has broken loose from the
ice pack surrounding the Pole and Is
inexorably melting away as it drifts to
ultimate extinction"
From this humiliation of matter, he
deduces, come the recently discovered
cosmic rays bombardini: the earth,
which penetrate 5 yards of lead and
correspond to about 940.000.000 volts.
"In sense" he continues, this radia-
ton is the most fundamental physical
phenomenon of the whole universe. Our
bodies are traversed by it night and
day. Short of going down into a mine
or in a submarine. we cannot escape 1t.
It is so intense that it breaks up several
million atoms in each of our bodies
every second. Il may be essential to life
or it may be killing u.s."
Are there any other planets in the
vast universe where life similar to that
on the theory that for planetary sys-
tenn to be born two stars must approach
each other close enough to tear out
some of the substance of the other,
Jeans says: Calculation shows that
even after their long lives of millions
Of millions of years only about one star
in 5000 can be surrounded by planets
born in this way. In the 1000 200, 600
stars surrounding our sun there are, at
a moderate computation, not more than
10000 planetary systems, because there
has not been time for more than this
number to be born. Calculation Sug-
gests birth rate of about one per ,000,-
100000 years. Thus we should have to
visit thousands of millions of stars be-
fore finding a planetary system of as
recent creation as our own, and we
should have to visit millions of millions
of stars before finding a planet upon
which civilization and interest in the
outer universe were as recent a growth
as were our own.
Lived More Eventful Past.
$50 far as we can Judge, our part Of
the universe has lived the more eventful
part of its life already. We are witness
ing the burning out of the candle ends
on an empty stage on which the drama
Is already over. There is not time for
many more planets to be born"
Another picture Of the vastness. of
space and time is presented in the same
report by Prof. A. Vibert Douglas of
McGill University in his description of
the island universes of which all the
visible and invisible billions of stars
centering in the Milky Way, one of
which is the sun, form a single exam