Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/30

20 thousand years; but for all that there may have been variations of quite as much as five or ten per cent, as we may judge from considering that the intensity of the solar radiation to the earth is six and a half per cent greater in January than in July; and neither at the equator nor in the northern or southern hemispheres has this difference been discovered by experience or general observation of any kind. But as for the mere age of the sun, irrespective of the question of uniformity, we have proof of something vastly more than three thousand years in geological history, with its irrefragable evidence of continuity of life on the earth in time past for tens of thousands, and probably for millions of years.

Here, then, we have a splendid subject for contemplation and research in natural philosophy, or physics, the science of dead matter. The sun, a mere piece of matter of the moderate dimensions which we know it to have, bounded all round by cold ether, has been doing work at the rate of four hundred and seventy-six thousand million million million horse-power for three thousand years and at possibly more, and certainly not much less, than that for a few million years. How is this to be explained? Natural philosophy can not evade the question, and no physicist who is not engaged in trying to answer it can have any other justification than that his whole working time is occupied with work on some other subject or subjects of his province by which he has more hope of being able to advance science.

I suppose I may assume that every person present knows as an established result of scientific inquiry that the sun is not a burning fire, and is merely a fluid mass cooling, with some little accession of fresh energy by meteors occasionally falling in, of very small account in comparison with the whole energy of heat which he gives out from year to year. You are also perfectly familiar with Helmholtz's form of the meteoric theory, and accept it as having the highest degree of scientific probability that can be assigned to any assumption regarding actions of prehistoric times. You understand, then, that the essential principle of the explanation is this: at some period of time, long past, the sun's initial heat was generated by the collision of pieces of matter gravitationally attracted together from distant space to build up his present mass; and shrinkage due to cooling gives, through the work done by the mutual gravitation of all parts of the shrinking mass, the vast thermal capacity in virtue of which the cooling has been, and continues to be, so slow. I assume that you have not been misled by any of your teachers who may have told you, or by any of your books in which you may have read, that the sun is becoming hotter because a gaseous mass, shrinking because it is becoming colder, becomes hotter because it shrinks.

An essential detail of Helmholtz's theory of solar heat is that the sun must be fluid, because even though given at any moment hot enough from the surface to any depth, however great, inward, to be