STARS AND ATOMS
LAST night in the calm silence of midnight, while all nature slept, I
observed in the telescope a small fixed star lost in the multitude of
the heavenly host, a pale star of the seventh magnitude separated from
us by an almost immeasurable distance.
In my thoughts I travelled up to it. I remembered that this star is
not visible to the naked eye; that there are 19 stars of the first
magnitude, 60 of the second, 182 of the third, 530 of the fourth, 1,600
of the fifth, and 4,800 of the sixth magnitude (which gives a total
of about 7,000 stars visible to the naked eye in the case of persons
gifted with acute vision); bub that the stars of the seventh magnitude,
one of which I was observing, are 13,000 in number, and those of the
eighth magnitude 40,000; that the number grows progressively as we
ascend beyond natural vision. I remember that the sum of the stars of
the first ten magnitudes amounts to 560,000, that of the first twelve
magnitudes to 4 million, and that we reach more than 40 millions in
taking the first fifteen magnitudes.
Without losing myself in the profundity of infinite perspectives, I
concentrated my thought as I had already concentrated my gaze upon this
simple seventh-magnitude star of the constellation of the Great Bear,
which never descends below the horizon of Paris, so that we can observe
it almost any night in the year, and I remembered that it shines 200
billion miles from here--a distance which an express train rushing
along at 75 miles an hour would take no less than 325 million years to
traverse.
* * * * *
Transported to such a distance, the glorious sun which illuminates
us would lose its splendour and its glory. Not only would it be
invisible to the naked eye, not only would it fail to contribute to the
brightness of the midnight sky, but it would fall considerably below
the star of the seventh magnitude above mentioned and would only be
discoverable by the most careful telescopic search. That small star,
therefore, which is only a small brilliant point in the starry heavens,
is in reality an immense sun of giant size, greatly in excess of that
on which our planet depends for its light. The latter is already
333,000 times heavier than the Earth and 1,300,000 times more bulky. In
claiming for that small star a weight more than a million times that
of our globe and a volume equalling that of several million Earths we
should be well within the region of possibility.
* * * * *
These views in connection with a simple star almost forgotten among the
multitude of its sisters bring us face to face with the most formidable
realities of the constitution of the universe. But they do not yet
represent the most interesting aspect of our contemplation. It is a
singular fact, quite unexpected by the ancient philosophers, fantastic
and hardly conceivable to the seeker after truth who endeavours to
comprehend its real value: It is that these suns of the infinite,
far from being fixed as they seem to be on account of their immense
distance, are travelling through space with tremendous speed. The star
in question[2] runs, flies, hurls itself across the immensity with a
speed of about 20 million miles per day!
There are no fixed stars.
Yes, 6,800 million miles per annum! And yet, in ten years, in fifty
years, in one hundred years, this star will be barely displaced in the
sky! The speed of a bullet or a shell fired by one of our most powerful
guns being only 2,340 feet per second and that of this star being a
million feet per second, we see that the speed of the star surpasses
that of the shell in the proportion of 457 to 1! Can the most daring
imagination picture such a flight!
In five days and some hours the star would cover the 92 million miles
which separate us from the Sun, a distance which a gunshot would take
seven years to cover. It is clear that such a speed is marvellous, yet
it exists, and has been measured by delicate and precise operations. It
cannot in any case be less than the figure we have indicated.
* * * * *
This speed is a symbol, and it is as such that I wish to present it
here. All the stars are endowed with such movements more or less rapid,
and not only all the stars--each of them a sun and most of them the
centres of planetary systems, dispensers of light, heat, and harmony,
around which gravitate habitable earths, the present, past, or future
abodes of various beings and terrestrial things--not only, I say, are
all the stars thus driven through the void, but all the planets, all
the satellites, all the worlds and systems, all creation.
The Earth swings round the Sun carried along with a speed of 1,600,000
miles per day, meanwhile rotating on its axis, animated by a dozen
different sorts of movements, lighter and more mobile than a child’s
balloon floating in the air, solicited by the attractions of various
neighbouring bodies, a veritable plaything of cosmic forces which
carry us along in an immense whirlpool. The Moon revolves round the
Earth, constantly deranging us in our progress and subjecting us to
perpetual undulations. The Sun carries us along with all its cortège
towards the constellation Hercules, so that since its very origin our
Earth has never passed through the same place twice, but describes in
space, not closed ellipses, but spirals which roll on without end. The
suns adjoining ours move with their systems in various directions.
The constellations are dislocated from one century to another, each
star being animated by a proper movement which produces a constant
modification of the figures in the sky. In addition to all this, our
whole sidereal system is carried along in space by a joint movement.
And thus everything moves, everything circulates, everything rushes,
with breathless speed, towards a goal which is unknown and which is
never reached.
This is not a romance, a dream of pure contemplation, an outside view
of ourselves: it is our own history, fatal and inevitable. Since an
hour ago, every one of us, reader or writer, rich or poor, wise or
ignorant, infant or greybeard, whether we are active or asleep--since
an hour ago every one of us has described in the sky an invisible track
of more than 60,000 miles, for our planet traces out 580 million miles
per annum merely by its revolution round the Sun, and a centenarian
lives to mark out a distance of 58,000 million miles. Now, it is found
that these speeds are the very condition of the stability of the
universe: the heavenly bodies, the Earth, planets, satellites, suns,
stellar systems, star clusters, galaxies, and remote universes, are
mutually sustained by the equilibrium of their attractions. They are
all suspended in the void and maintain themselves in their ideal orbits
simply because they turn quickly enough to create a centrifugal force
equal and opposite to the attraction exerted upon them, so that they
remain in an unstable but perpetual equilibrium.
Our Sun carries us along towards the constellation of Hercules:
this has been known for a hundred years; but we know now that the
constellation of Hercules forms part of our sidereal universe and that
that universe is travelling in a certain direction. We therefore only
perceive relative movements. Whither are we going? Vain question. We
are going--into infinite space.
Formerly people were troubled, not without reason, concerning the
solidity of the foundations of the world, for before the isolation
of our planet in space and its movement round the Sun had been
demonstrated it seemed indispensable to give to the Earth an unshakable
foundation and an unlimited route. But since the heavenly bodies rise
and set and pass under our feet this foundation had to be given up,
apart from the fact that it did not satisfy the most far-seeing minds.
It is quite impossible for us to conceive a material pile, however
solid or thick, even as thick as the Earth’s diameter and rooted in
infinite space, just as one cannot imagine the real existence of a
stick which has only one end. However far the mind can descend towards
the base of that material pillar, the end must come at last, since
only empty space can be without end, and then that terrestrial pillar
serves no purpose at all since it is itself without a support. Besides,
travellers succeeded one day in voyaging all round the globe, and
nowhere was this imaginary pillar discovered.
The modern conception of force in contrast with the ancient idea of
matter has a philosophical import without precedent in the whole
history of the science. It teaches, proves to us, and convinces us that
the visible, palpable, material universe rests on the invisible and the
immaterial, on imponderable force.
That is a fact against which the misleading testimony of the senses
can no longer prevail. The Earth, which was believed to be the stable
basis of creation, is itself not sustained by anything material, but by
invisible force. The void extends above and below, right and left, and
to infinity in every direction. It is sustained by solar attraction and
by its own movement. The same applies to all worlds, to all heavenly
bodies, to everything which composes the universe, to the intimate
constitution of bodies as well as the sidereal total. The Earth, the
planets, the suns, the stars, the stellar systems, are the mobile atoms
of the grand organism of the universe. The Milky Way is a dust in which
every grain is a sun.
* * * * *
From the infinitely great, let us now descend to the infinitely small
The substances which appear to us most solid and hard are composed of
molecules which do not touch each other. Every one of these molecules
is invisible to the naked eye and is itself made up of still smaller
atoms which do not touch either.
A bar of iron, for example, is composed of molecules which do not
touch, which are in perpetual vibration, which separate under the
influence of heat and close up under the influence of cold. Exposed
to the Sun, the temperature of that bar reaches about 60 degrees
centigrade; cooled by the ice of winter, it descends a few degrees
below zero. Now, the length of that bar varies between the first
condition and the second, and its molecules can be further separated by
heating them to a higher temperature: they can thus be so far separated
from each other that they exercise no further mutual attraction. When
that happens, the bar melts and forms first a liquid and then a gas.
* * * * *
The Eiffel Tower is a little higher in summer than in winter and in the
afternoon than the morning, on account of the variation produced by
solar heat. The difference in height can attain 6 inches.
* * * * *
The smallness of molecules surpasses anything one can imagine. In
the gold-beating industry gold-leaf has been obtained so thin that a
quarter of a million leaves go to the inch. Each gold-leaf, therefore,
has only a thickness of a 1/10,000 of a millimetre. Now, it is composed
of molecules a considerable number of which is required to fill up that
thickness. Two hundred of them arranged in a line and separated by
intervals equal to their own diameters would just fill up the thickness
of a gold-leaf.
In experiments made on the action of oil upon the surface of water for
calming the waves, it has been found possible to cover 400 square yards
on the Lake of Geneva with 20 c.cm. of oil, which reduces the layer
of oil also to 1/200,000 of a millimetre. Supposing that under these
conditions the molecules of oil are in contact and in a single layer,
they would at the most have that diameter.
By mechanical means a millimetre has been divided on a plate of
glass into a thousand equal parts. There are animalculæ so small
that their whole body placed between two of these divisions does not
touch them. These living beings then measure at the most 1/1,000 of a
millimetre, or what is nowadays called a micron. They have members,
organs, muscles, nerves, etc. These organs are composed of cells and
the cells of molecules. If the latter were only a hundredth part of
the dimensions of the body (they are probably much smaller), these
molecules would measure, if separated by intervals equal to their own
size, 1/200,000 of a millimetre as before.
Molecules or atoms, whatever may be the name applied to the ultimate
particles of matter, are declared by present-day science to be equal to
stellar systems or microcosms.
* * * * *
This modern teaching of microscopy was anticipated for a long time by
thinkers.
In his _Commercium Philosophicum_, published in 1745, Bernoulli
wrote to Leibnitz concerning the imaginary inhabitants of a grain of
pepper.
“If these animalculæ had an intelligent mind and were capable of
reasoning, they could flatter themselves that they and the drop of
liquid which they inhabit constituted the entire universe. Imagine that
a small grain of pepper in which under the power of the microscope
we discover a million animalculæ had all its parts proportional to
the corresponding parts of our world, that is to say, its sun, its
fixed stars, its planets with their satellites, its earth, and its
mountains, its fields, its forests, its rocks, its rivers, its lakes,
its seas, and its diverse animals, can one suppose that the inhabitants
of the grain of pepper, these _pipericols_, who would perceive
all objects under the same visual angle and consequently in the same
size as we do, would not believe that outside their grain nothing
exists, and would have the same right to believe it as we believe that
our world includes everything? For, I ask you, what reason or what
experience would they have which would convince them of the contrary
or would show to these poor little animals that there is another world
incomparably greater than their own with inhabitants incomparably
greater than themselves?”
Therefore, concludes Bernoulli, if these _pipericols_ cannot know
that, who is there among us who knows that this whole visible world
is not perhaps a grain in comparison with another world incomparably
greater?
The learned geometrician of Basle summarises his idea as follows: “I
believe that there can exist in nature other animals who are in size
as far above us and ordinary animals as we and our animals are above
microscopic animalculæ, and who observe us in our world with their
microscopes as we observe that infinite multitude of animalculæ with
ours. I go further and maintain that there might be beings incomparably
larger again, and I suppose as many degrees upward as are found in
going downwards, for I do not see why we should constitute the highest
degree.”
Leibnitz replied to Bernoulli: “I am not afraid of advancing the
opinion that there are in the universe animals that are as much our
superiors in size as we are above the animalculæ which we only
discover by means of a microscope, for nature knows no limits. On the
other hand, it may be and it must be that there are in the small grains
of dust and in the smallest atoms worlds which are not inferior to ours
in beauty and variety.”
The exceedingly small microscopic organisms discovered and studied by
Ehrenberg at the beginning of the nineteenth century seemed to place
this population in evidence.
Pascal had written, as early as 1660, or perhaps even in 1654, in his
_Pensées_:
“What is man in the infinite? Let a flesh-worm offer him in the
smallness of its body parts which are yet smaller. Legs with joints,
veins in those legs, blood in those veins, humours in that blood, drops
in those humours, vapours in those drops. Suppose that in dividing
up these last things he should spend his forces of imagination and
that the last object at which he could arrive be the subject of our
present discussion. He will perhaps think that that is the extreme of
smallness in Nature. But I shall open for him a new abyss. I shall not
only paint for him the visible universe but the immensity of nature
which one can conceive within the range of this small atom. Let him
see in it an infinity of worlds, every one with its firmament, its
planets, its earths, in the same proportion as the visible world, on
that earth animals and finally flesh-worms in which he will find again
what the first flesh-worms presented to him. Let him go on finding the
same thing without end and without rest. Let him lose himself in those
marvels as astonishing in their smallness as the others are in their
size, for who would not be astonished that our body, hardly perceptible
in the universe which itself would be imperceptible in the grand
totality, should now be a colossus, a world or rather a universe in
comparison with the nothingness which we can never arrive at.
“Whoever follows these thoughts will be afraid of himself and,
considering himself sustained by the weight which nature has given him,
between those two abysses of the infinite and nothing, he will tremble
in face of those marvels, and I believe that as his curiosity changes
to admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence
than to seek them with presumption.
“For indeed what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the
infinite, a universe in comparison with nothing, a mean between nothing
and all. Infinitely removed as he is from comprehending the extremes,
the goal and principle of things are invincibly concealed from him
in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing that
nothingness whence he sprang or that infinite which swallows him up.”
More than one of our contemporary savants has republished this
conception of “the atom as a world system,” imagining that it is new
and without appearing to recollect either Bernoulli or Pascal.
* * * * *
As we have seen before, the invisible world is the basis of creation
and the visible universe is composed of invisible bodies. What we see
is made up of things which we do not see.
In the sky every star of the Milky Way being below the seventh
magnitude is quite invisible to our eye. Yet we see the Milky Way.
On the Earth we see and touch crowds of molecules every particle of
which could be neither seen with our eyes nor felt with our touch
nor perceived with any of our senses. And yet one meets very often
so-called scientific men in the world who say peremptorily: “I only
believe what I see.”
A large number of different measurements of the speed of light agree in
proving that this speed is 186,000 miles a second. That is a fact of
observation absolutely proved by astronomy and by physics.
These 186,000 miles amount to 982 million feet or 11,785 million inches.
Now, certain measurements of the same degree of precision show that in
a ray of red light there are 42,300 waves to the inch or 1,666 to the
millimetre.
Each of these waves therefore measures 6/10,000 of a millimetre. Those
of the extreme red measure 7/10,000; beyond the red, wave-lengths of
8 or 9/10,000 are found; the blue waves measure 4 to 5/10,000 and the
violet 4/10,000.
Expressed in millionths of a millimetre, as is usual in spectroscopy,
these wave-lengths are the following:—
WAVE-LENGTHS OF LIGHT
Infra-red 900 or more
Extreme-red (A) 760
Red (B) 687
Orange (C) 666
Yellow (D) 689
Green (E) 617
Blue (F) 486
Indigo (Q) 431
Violet (H) 897
Ultra violet 380 and less
(These figures are those of the solar spectrum, measured for the first
time by Frauenhofer a century ago.)
Those are waves in the ether, which is in perpetual movement.
If we multiply 300,000 million millimetres by 1,666, we find the number
500 billion. That is the number of waves which enter our eye in one
second when we look at red light.
It requires 2,230 waves of violet light to fill up a millimetre and 700
billion shocks per second to give the sensation of that colour.
Between the red and the violet all the other colours range themselves.
The vibrations which give the impression of red are the slowest and
their waves are the longest.
This subtle substance, ether, penetrates all the bodies; it surrounds
the most minute atoms of objects and beings, solids and liquids.
Studies in molecular physics have led to this conclusion, that in a
cubic centimetre of air the molecules which compose it only occupy a
third of a cubic millimetre, that is to say, the 3/1,000 part of the
total volume. It is like a cathedral in which children’s balloons might
float, the remaining space being empty.
All these molecules, all these systems of atoms, are in perpetual
motion like the worlds in space, and the structure of bodies is
organised by invisible force. In hydrogen, at ordinary temperature
and pressure, every molecule is endowed with a speed of translation,
vibration, and circulation, of more than a mile per second.
Every body, organic or inorganic, air, water, plant, animal, man, is
thus formed of molecules in movement.
The analysis of bodies, both organic and inorganic, therefore brings
us into the presence of movements of atoms controlled by forces, and
the infinitely small speaks to us the same language as the infinitely
great.
The powerful microscopes of to-day and instruments of projection show
in these microbian movements in these cells a fantastic life such as
that of organisms which circulate by the thousand million in our own
blood.
The molecule, intangible and invisible, and hardly imaginable by our
minds accustomed to superficial judgments, constitutes the only true
matter, and what we call matter is, singularly enough, the effect
produced upon our senses by the movements of molecules, constituting as
it were an incessant possibility of sensation.
It follows that matter, like the manifestations of energy, is only a
mode of motion. At the temperature of absolute zero, matter, as we know
it, would cease to exist.
* * * * *
The name of materialist, still borne to-day by certain people who see
no farther than the ordinary appearances of things, could only be
considered by the thinker as an outworn expression without meaning. The
visible universe is not at all what it appears to be to our senses: it
is the invisible universe which constitutes the essence and basis of
creation. In fact, this visible universe is composed of invisible atoms
which are not in contact; it hangs in the void, and the forces which
control it are themselves invisible and immaterial. You may look for
matter, but you will not find it; it is a mirage which recedes as we
advance towards it; it is a spectre which disappears whenever we seem
to seize it. It is not the same with force, the dynamic element; it is
invisible and imponderable force that we find in the last analysis and
which represents the basis, the support, and the very essence of the
universe.
In the deep and silent night everything moves driven by the breath of
God. In these hours of calm reflection, do we not hear the voices of
the infinite? Night is the normal condition of empty space, and we
only have day during a half-rotation of the Earth because we dwell in
the immediate neighbourhood of a star. Night fills all; but it is not
darkness; it is the soft light shed by millions of stars. We can thus
better appreciate how everything is in vibration. The movements of
every atom on earth and in the heavens are the mathematical result of
all the ethereal undulations which arrive in time from the abysses of
infinite space. The moon attracts the Earth, the Earth attracts her
sister-planets, these beckon and call her, the stars attract the Sun;
and, like those motes of dust which one sees oscillating and vibrating
in a beam of light, so also glide, turn, circulate, fly, vibrate, and
palpitate all the worlds and all the universes, out to infinity, amidst
limitless and bottomless space.
A geometrician has dared to say that by stretching out his hand he
could disturb the Moon in its course. This is a vivid expression of
the extreme mobility of things intended to show that the feeblest
displacement of the centre of gravity has a far-reaching effect. When
the Moon passes over our heads it raises the whole Earth, displaces the
waters of the ocean, and makes every one of us weigh 18 milligrammes
less than when it is on the horizon. When Venus passes at 25 million
miles from here or when Jupiter passes at 375 million miles, both
displace our whole planet from its normal position.
Have you ever brought a bit of iron near a freely suspended magnetic
needle? What a marvellous spectacle is offered by the mobility, the
oscillations, the mad rushes of the needle under the influence of an
object apparently inert which acts upon it at a distance. We observe
a compass needle at the bottom of an hermetically sealed vessel: a
regiment passes on a neighbouring road and the needle becomes agitated,
influenced at a distance by the steel bayonets. An aurora borealis
appears in Sweden, the compass feels it in Paris; nay, we have seen
above that the fluctuations of the magnetic needle are in relation with
the spots and eruptions on the Sun. The new physics is the proclamation
of the invisible universe.
* * * * *
It is under this aspect which it appeared to me interesting here to
contemplate the visible universe, inviting to this contemplation those
among my readers who wish sometimes to think of profounder truths.
Stars and atoms bring us face to face with an immense symphony. Those
who only see the orchestra without hearing anything are the deaf.
Behind the visible world, our minds must feel the presence of the
invisible world upon which we are based. All that we see is appearance:
the real is the invisible, the force, the energy, which moves all and
carries all through infinity and eternity.
And indeed we are really in the infinite and the eternal. The little
star of which we spoke before, an enormous sun a million times the size
of the Earth moves at such a distance that the fastest express train
would take at least 325 million years to reach it. Yet it is one of our
neighbouring stars. One can go still farther and farther and proceed
with any speed through any number of centuries in any direction of
space without ever coming to an end, without ever advancing a single
pace, since the centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere, and
eternity itself does not suffice to vanquish infinity.
[Footnote 2: This star is called “No. 1830 Groombridge.”]
X. ARE OTHER PLANETS
INHABITED?