Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/33

Rh on the thread of an ideal screw cut on a vertical shaft of ideal matter, absolutely hard and absolutely frictionless: first, go back a step to our supposition of just one such rod and screw working in a single pit excavated down to the center of the sun, and let us suppose all the rest of the sun's mass to be rigid and absolutely impervious to heat. Warm up the matter of the pyramidal rod to such a temperature that its material melts and experiences enough of Sir Humphry Davy's "repulsive motion" to keep it balanced as a fluid, without either sinking or rising from the position in which it was held by the thread of the screw. When the matter is thus held up without the screw, take away the screw or let it melt in its place. We should thus have a pit from the sun's surface to his center, of a square metre area at the surface, full of incandescent fluid, which we may suppose to be of the actual ingredients of the solar substance. This fluid, having at the first instant the temperature with which the paddle left it, would at the first instant continue radiating heat just as it did when the paddle was kept moving; but it would quickly become much cooler at its surface, and to a distance of a few metres down. Convection-currents, with their irregular whirls, would carry the cool fluid down from the surface, and bring up hotter fluid from below, but this mixing could not go on through a depth of very many metres to a sufficient degree to keep up anything approaching to the high temperature maintained by the paddle; and after a few hours or days, solidification would commence at the surface. If the solidified matter floats on the fluid at the same temperature below it, the crust would simply thicken as ice on a lake thickens in frosty weather; but if, as is more probable, solid matter, of such ingredients as the sun is composed of, sinks in the liquid when both are at the melting temperature of the substance, thin films of the upper crust would fall in, and continue falling in, until, for several metres downward, the whole mass of mixed solid and fluid becomes stiff enough (like the stiffness of paste or of mortar) to prevent the frozen film from falling down from the surface. The surface film would then quickly thicken, and in the course of a few hours or days become less than red-hot on its upper surface. The whole pit full of fluid would go on cooling with extreme slowness until, after possibly about a million million million years or so, it would be all at the same temperature as the space to which its upper end radiates.

Now, let precisely what we have been considering be done for every one of our pyramidal rods, with, however, in the first place, thin partitions of matter impervious to heat separating every pit from its four surrounding neighbors. Precisely the same series of events as we have been considering will take place in every one of the pits.

Suppose the whole complex mass to be rotating at the rate of once round in twenty-five days.

Now at the instant when the paddle stops let all the partitions be