Modern Essays of Various Types/The Kingdom of the Heavens

The Kingdom of the Heavens by Charles Nordmann, Reviewed by Algernon Blackwood “The stars won’t bear thinking about,” declares the Rajah in The Green Goddess, “and as a spectacle they’re monotonous.” He expresses the unimaginative view. Charles Nordmann, of the Paris Observatory, is more imaginative. “Astronomy,” he says, “is the least shortsighted of human disciplines. It tends to make man more modest, more agnostic, less assertive, dogmatic, and sectarian. It holds us dizzily over those precipices where the physical and the metaphysical touch. The Attraction of the Unknown is full of a bitter sweetness.” In his stimulating book he writes “not to instruct or amuse, but to produce thoughts and even dreams, if I can.” The lure of the unknown is in his blood; he, luckily, has technique and a telescope; he is the man of science as poet. His imaginative mind discusses only the most recent star secrets, as revealed by the spectroscope on the “little dust particle we call the Earth.” The wonder and beauty of what he tells us are staggering⁠—to the layman often incredible⁠—but they are never fanciful. Awe and reverence go hand in hand. He quotes with approval the master mathematician, Henri Poincare: “People ask the gods to prove their existence by miracles. But the eternal miracle is that there are no miracles.” The cosmos is not governed by caprice. “The most impressive fact that emerges from a consideration of the heavens is the sense of law and order, as of a divine Intelligence, which pervades the whole gigantic business.” Mr. Nordmann’s previous book, Einstein and the Universe, went into numerous editions in France, and was among the bestsellers. The present volume should share its fate. In a preface touched with humor, he writes: Most thinking people aspire at times to escape from the military or monetary controversies which characterize our “idealist” times.⁠ ⁠… Novels? These glittering fictions are often modeled too narrowly upon meager human realities. Love has been surrounded with poetry by Art, and with ecstasy by Nature. Yet we must have other enthusiasms. Fairy Tales? These are nothing compared to the telephone, X-rays, stellar spectrosopy, etc. Arts and letters? Past ages have equalled them. The world’s political and social changes? 10,000 years these have moved in the same vicious circle. There remain the Sciences⁠—in particular the most finished of them, the most disinterested: the Stars. Stars are adorable because they resemble those chimeras for which hopeless love seeks in vain. Our nostalgia for the infinite, refusing to be stifled, finds in the stars a remunerative field for exploration. Leaving our familiar “dust particle,” the Earth, in this volume, we leave also the friendly blue air (its color due merely to our thin skin of atmosphere), and plunge through the true sky, which is black, “a deep black of eternal mourning.” Accosting the planets in passing, we race onward to the sun, “whose singular magnetic and electric influences, like a sort of telepathy, make us tremble at its slightest spasms,” and thence take our upward rush to those “strange ant-heaps, called clusters, and finally to the vertiginous spiral nebulae.” We spend a weekend on the moon, however, en route, for no astronomer can ever leave the moon alone. This trumpery little satellite holds too many mysteries among her mountains, 24,000 feet in height, and her craters, 21,000 feet in depth. Her strange acceleration, for one thing, has now been fully explained. It is only a few seconds of arc per century, one second of arc being less than the 300,000th part of a right-angle, but that she should be apparently slowing down was a disquieting puzzle. The solution of the mystery lies in the fact that the Earth herself is the laggard, turning less and less quickly on her own axis. And this is due partly to the friction of the present oceans on the ocean floor, and partly to the intense friction of the viscous and more fluid portions of the Earth’s interior. These drag at her. The moon does not turn more slowly, but the sidereal day is increasing. The strange “patches of vegetation” noticed by Professor Pickering 2 are also mentioned and explained⁠—away. They appear just after sunrise, spread over enormous areas, then dis appear in a few minutes again. They were observed in the bottom of the deep craters. They are due to “the refraction of the sun’s rays by myriads of crystals with sharp edges.” Mars detains us for a moment or two, with its double hint of artificial canals and possible inhabitants. The canals are an optical illusion, a mirage, due to the use of low-power telescopes, which tend to make dots like lines. Through a high-power telescope there are no lines at all. Mr. Nordmann is very positive on the subject. He is less positive with regard to life on the planet, where, in any case, there is less oxygen than on the top of Mount Everest. After discussing the possibility that life⁠—germs reached the Earth first upon some meteorite or other body after a journey of countless light-years, he admits his readiness to believe that life may exist elsewhere. This does not mean that thinking organisms exist only on the Earth (he says). I am even inclined to be convinced of the contrary. Yet nothing has yet proved that life exists anywhere but here. Is it not wiser perhaps (he asks) to consider organized life as a protoplasmic accident, as rare in space as it is in time? We land next on the sun, which is only 93,000,000 miles away, whereas some of the stars are 400,000 light years away, light, of course, traveling 186,000 miles a second. The way the sun’s constant loss of heat is restored⁠—by contraction⁠—has interest. Its diameter grows 500 feet less annually, and this contraction engenders enough heat to replace what is poured out so prodigally. The process may continue some eight million years before we notice any difference. It had been held until recently that by the time our planets fall into the sun (their eventual fate), the sun would be cold. Now radium has changed this prophecy. The planets will take their final rush and plunge into a sun still hot. “Life will be volatilized in that grand crematorium, the sun,” states Mr. Nordmann almost with enthusiasm. In his contemplation of the appallingly distant “is land-universes” we cannot follow him here, nor listen to his fascinating description of the new method of measuring a star’s diameter. Betelgeuse, we know from this discovery, is as large as the orbit of Mars round the sun which reminds us of the Rajah’s comment that the stars won’t bear thinking about. He closes his volume, at any rate, on a practical note about something nearer home: the use of the tides to help our daily work along. The tides provide an extremely powerful machine with the movement of an alternating piston. “When humanity emerges from its ignorance,” he hopes and believes, “it will utilize the thousands of millions of horsepower. Then, no more under the necessity of devouring each other in order to live, people will occupy themselves with science, art, etc. …” The French Government, he informs us, has already inaugurated this Golden Age by appointing a commission to attack the problem at points on the coast.