Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/35

 he said, "is to point out how it is conceivable that, at some indefinitely distant period, an opposite condition of the world may take place, in which the energy which is now being diffused may be reconcentrated into foci, and stores of chemical power again produced from the inert compounds which are now being continually formed. There must exist between the atmospheres of the heavenly bodies a material medium capable of transmitting light and heat; and it may be regarded as almost certain that this interstellar medium is perfectly transparent and diathermanous; that is to say, that it is incapable of converting heat or light from the radiant into the fixed or conductible form. If this be the case, the interstellar medium must be incapable of acquiring any temperature whatever, and all heat which arrives in the conductible form at the limits of the atmosphere of a star or planet, will there be totally converted, partly into ordinary motion by the expansion of the atmosphere, and partly into the radiant form. The ordinary motion will again be converted into heat, so that radiant heat is the ultimate form to which all physical energy tends; and in this form it is, in the present condition of the world, diffusing itself from the heavenly bodies through the interstellar medium. Let it now be supposed, that, in all directions round the visible world, the interstellar medium has bounds beyond which there is empty space. If this conjecture be true, then on reaching those bounds, the radiant heat of the world will be totally reflected, and will ultimately be reconcentrated into foci. At each of these foci the intensity of heat may be expected to be such, that should a star (being at that period an extinct mass of inert compounds) in the course of its motions arrive at that point of space, it will be vaporized and resolved into its elements; a store of chemical power being thus reproduced at the expense of a corresponding amount of radiant heat. Thus it appears, that although, from what we can see of the known world, its condition seems to tend continually towards the equable diffusion in the form of radiant heat, of all physical energy, the extinction of the stars, and the cessation of all phenomena; yet the world, as now created, may possibly be provided within