Joseph McCabe

“ By the brilliant work of the Alexandrian astronomers the old world seemed to be approaching the discovery of the universe. Men were beginning to think in millions, to gaze boldly into deep abysses of space, to talk of vast fiery globes that made the earth insignificant But the splendid energy gradually failed, and the long line was closed by Ptolemaeus, who once more put the earth in the centre of the system, and so imposed what is called the Ptolemaic system on Europe. ”

“ Less than half a century ago the making of worlds was, in popular expositions of science, a comparatively easy business. Take an indefinite number of atoms of various gases and metals, scatter them in a fine cloud over some thousands of millions of miles of space, let gravitation slowly compress the cloud into a globe, its temperature rising through the compression, let it throw off a ring of matter, which in turn gravitation will compress into a globe, and you have your earth circulating round the sun. ”

“ There were even those who felt that ether would prove to be the one source of all matter and energy. And just before the century closed a light began to shine in those deeper abysses of the submaterial world, and the foundations of the universe began to appear. ”

“ Some affirm that the universe is infinite; others that it is limited. We have no firm ground in science for either assertion. Those who claim that the system is limited point out that, as the stars decrease in brightness, they increase so enormously in number that the greater faintness is more than compensated, and therefore, if there were an infinite series of magnitudes, the midnight sky would be a blaze of light. But this theoretical reasoning does not allow for dense regions of space that may obstruct the light, or vast regions of vacancy between vast systems of stars. ”

“ We have to study the birth and death of worlds, perhaps the most impressive of all the studies that modern science offers us. Indeed, if we would read the whole story of evolution, there is an earlier chapter even than this; the latest chapter to be opened by science, the first to be read. We have to ask where the matter, which we are going to gather into worlds, itself came from; to understand more clearly what is the relation to it of the forces or energies—gravitation, electricity, etc.—with which we glibly mould it into worlds, or fashion it into living things ”

“ We may be content to conclude that the starry universe over which our great telescopes keep watch stretches for thousands, and probably tens of thousands, of billions of miles. There are myriads of stars so remote that, though each is a vast incandescent globe at a temperature of many thousand degrees, and though their light is concentrated on the mirrors or in the lenses of our largest telescopes and directed upon the photographic plate at the rate of more than 800 billion waves a second, they take several hours to register the faintest point of light on the plate. ”

“ The glimpses which adventurous Greeks had obtained of the great outlying universe were forgotten for a thousand years. The earth became again the little platform in the centre of a little world, on which men and women played their little parts, preening themselves on their superiority to their pagan ancestors. ”

“ Before we come to tell the fortunes of our little earth we have to see how matter is gathered into these stupendous globes of fire, how they come sometimes to have smaller bodies circling round them on which living things may appear, how they supply the heat and light and electricity that the living things need, and how the story of life on a planet is but a fragment of a larger story. ”

“ When we reflect that the universe has grown with the growth of our telescopes and the application of photography we wonder whether we may as yet see only a fraction of the real universe, as small in comparison with the whole as the Babylonian system was in comparison with ours. ”

“ The universe was composed of an infinite number of indestructible particles, called "atoms," which had gradually settled from a state of chaotic confusion to their present orderly arrangement in large masses. The sun was a body of enormous size, and the points of light in the Milky Way were similar suns at a tremendous distance from the earth. Our universe, moreover, was only one of an infinite number of universes, and an eternal cycle of destruction and re-formation was running through these myriads of worlds. ”

“ I do not adopt any of the numerous devices that have been invented for the purpose of impressing on the imagination the large figures we must use. One may doubt if any of them are effective, and they are at least familiar. Our solar system—the family of sun and planets which had been sheltered under a mighty dome resting on the hill-tops—has turned out to occupy a span of space some 16,000,000,000 miles in diameter. That is a very small area in the new universe. Draw a circle, 100 billion miles in diameter, round the sun, and you will find that it contains only three stars besides the sun. ”

“ The earth and the other planets were revolving round the central fire of the system; but the sun was a reflection of this central fire, not the fire itself. Even Pythagoras, moreover, made the heavens a solid sphere revolving, with its stars, round the central fire; and the truth he discovered was mingled with so much mysticism, and confined to so small and retired a school, that it was quickly lost again. In the next generation Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a vast globe of white-hot iron, and that the stars were material bodies made white-hot by friction with the ether. ”

“ The keen school-life of Alexandria still ran on, and there might have been a return to the saner early doctrines, but at last Alexandrian culture was extinguished in the blood of the aged Hypatia, and the night fell. Rome had had no genius for science ”

“ Amongst the fragments of its civilisation we find representations of the firmament as a goddess, arching over the earth on her hands and feet, condemned to that eternal posture by some victorious god. ”

“ The action of gravitation is the all-sustaining power. Once introduce that idea, and the great ocean of ether might stretch illimitably on every side, and the vastest bodies might be scattered over it and traverse it in stupendous paths. ”

“ Commonly the stars are in pairs, turning round a common centre in periods that may occupy hundreds of days or hundreds of years. Here and there they are gathered into clusters, sometimes to the number of thousands in a cluster, travelling together over the desert of space, or trailing in lines like luminous caravans. All are rushing headlong at inconceivable speeds. Few are known to be so sluggish as to run, like our sun, at only 8000 miles an hour. ”

“ Greek culture passed to Alexandria, where it met the remains of the culture of Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia, and one more remarkable effort was made to penetrate the outlying universe before the night of the Middle Ages fell on the old world. ”

“ Like the chance crowd on which you may look down in the square of a great city, they range from the infant to the worn and sinking aged. There is this difference, however, that the embryos of worlds sprawl, gigantic and luminous, across the expanse ”

“ Sirius is more than twice the size of our sun and gives out twenty times as much light. Canopus emits 20,000 times as much light as the sun, but we cannot say, in this case, how much larger it is than the sun. Arcturus, however, belongs to the same class of stars as our sun, and astronomers conclude that it must be thousands of times larger than the sun. A few stars are known to be smaller than the sun. Some are, intrinsically, far more brilliant ”

“ Even apart from the evidence that dark nebulae or other special light-absorbing regions do exist, the question is under discussion in science at the present moment whether light is not absorbed in the passage through ordinary space. ”

“ However, this part of space seems to be below the average in point of population, and we must adopt a different way of estimating the magnitude of the universe from the number of its stellar citizens.
Beyond the vast sphere of comparatively empty space immediately surrounding our sun lies the stellar universe into which our great telescopes are steadily penetrating. Recent astronomers give various calculations, ranging from 200,000,000 to 2,000,000,000, of the number of stars that have yet come within our faintest knowledge. ”