The World Beyond
FOR most of us the universe is the familiar present it which on rare occasions becomes linked with an infinite and shadowed area beyond our comprehension save for the torches briefly lit for us by philosophers and scientists of brilliance.
A CERTAIN theatrical press agent, a familiar figure on Broadway, died some months ago, and among his effects was a well-thumbed copy of Sir James Jeans’s learned volume, Astronomy and Cosmogony. Friends recall the strange absorption of this gay worldling in that ponderous tome of mathematical formulæ and cosmic theories, and his apologia, when anyone challenged his interest in these outside fields: ‘Watch physics and astronomy; great things are coming.’
Many of us are watching physics and astronomy, and Sir James Jeans is a master guide in this fascinating pursuit. Since his retirement from Princeton and return to his native England, a remarkable succession of publications in the physical sciences has issued from his pen. He has become the great reporter, the great expounder, the great explainer. The two present volumes are examples of popularization of science at its best.
To one acquainted even superficially with astronomy, much of the contents of The Stars in Their Courses (Macmillan, $2.50) will appear as a recapitulation of familiar knowledge in a somewhat colloquial style. Indeed, the book is frankly offered as an expansion of the author’s radio talks recently broadcast. Woven into the warp of time-honored facts, however, is much that has just emerged from observatories and laboratories. Thus the final chapter brings forward the recent discovery of high velocities of recession for some of the spiral nebulæ, and gives Jeans opportunity to outline possible explanations of this spectacular stampeding of galaxies. Lemaître’s current theory of a soap-bubble universe, continually expanding and dispersing at an ever-increasing velocity, is presented — with its suggestion that we live in an exploding universe. Some critics of the jazz age will no doubt agree.
More erudite—and more gripping!—is Jeans’s other recent volume, The Mysterious Universe (Macmillan, $2.25). In his introduction Jeans says: ‘Before the philosophers have a right to speak their interpretation of the universe, science ought first to be asked to tell all it can as to ascertained facts and provisional hypotheses.’ This the author undertakes to do in the early chapters. Then, in the final chapter, he. turns philosopher, wades into the deep waters, and himself suggests an interpretation.
His God the Mathematician will satisfy neither the traditionalist nor the materialist. But the perplexed modern, who still wonders if the universe is friendly, may be heartened to learn that this eminent scientist, after reviewing the evidence, concludes that ‘while much in it [the universe] is hostile to the material appendages of life, much also is akin to the fundamental activities of life; we are not so much strangers or intruders in the universe as we at first thought.’
This seems a very different conclusion from the suggestion, offered a few years ago, that life may be a disease which afflicts matter in its old age.
But what is life? And what is matter?
Life seems to exist ‘only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional qualities.’ By implication, we might assume that life is a fruiting of carbon complications. No carbon, no life. So far as chemistry is concerned, life means no more than magnetism or radioactivity—and, ‘viewed from a strictly material standpoint, the utter insignificance of life would seem to go far toward dispelling any idea that it forms a special interest of the Great Architect.’
Matter, which was once thought of as made of indivisible atoms, which was later broken still finer into infinitesimal planetary systems of protons and electrons, and more recently was identified as waves, now appears to be ‘nothing but a congealed sort of radiation traveling at less than normal speed.’ Thus the whole universe reduces to a world of light.
The world of radiation, in which a mechanistic interpretation has become as untenable as anthropomorphism; in which fate knocks at the door of the radium atom and decrees its death irrespective of its condition; in which the law of probability supplants the law of cause and effect, so that nature appears to abhor precision above all things; in which determinism becomes an illusion, and the universe itself a bubble blown of emptiness, empty space welded on to empty time — this is the mysterious universe of Jeans’s early chapters. From such shadows — for in physics ‘we are not yet in contact with reality’ —he infers a cosmos ‘more like a grand thought than like a great machine.’
Whether one accepts the philosophy or not, the science of this volume is a brilliant summing up of the new knowledge, which has flowed like a torrent from the laboratories during recent years, and is still flowing.
GEORGE W. GRAY