Page:In the high heavens.djvu/270

 in our laboratories. Of course no one now doubts that the great law of the conservation of energy holds good. We do not in the least believe that because the sun's heat is radiated away in such profusion that it is therefore entirely lost. It travels off no doubt to the depths of space, and as to what may become of it there we have no information. Everything we know points to the law that energy is as indestructible as matter itself. The heat scattered from the sun exists at least as ethereal vibration if in no other form. But it is most assuredly true that this energy so copiously dispensed is lost to our solar system. There is no form in which it is returned, or in which it can be returned. The energy of the system is as surely declining as the store of energy of the clock declines according as the weight runs down. In the clock, however, the energy is restored by winding up the weight, but there is no analogous process known in our system.

It was long a mystery how the sun was able to retain its heat so as to supply continually its prodigious rate of expenditure. The suppositions that would most naturally occur were shown to be utterly insufficient. We know that a great iron casting often takes many hours to grow cold after it has been drawn from the mould. If the casting be a sufficiently large one, the cooling will proceed so slowly that it will not get cold for days, because the tardiness of cooling increases with the dimensions of the body. It was not, perhaps, unnatural to suppose that as the sun was so vast, the process of cooling would proceed with such extreme slowness that notwithstanding the quantity of heat poured out every second, the annual amount of loss would be so small relatively to the whole