Worlds in the Making. By Svante Arrhenius. Translated by Dr.
H. Borns. (Harper and Brothers. 6s. net.)—" The evolution of the Universe" is the problem which Dr. Arrhenius attacks, and he attacks it from something of the same standpoint as that occupied by Herschel in his theory of the stellar nebulae. "I have endeavoured to show," he writes, "how nebulae may originate from suns and suns from nebulae" ; and he adds—there was a time when the addition would have been ranked among the worst of heresies—"I assume that this change has always been pro- ceeding." A related question in which man must be profoundly interested—so far as he can be interested in processes which lie wholly outside his activities—is, How does the sun replenish its losses of heat? Yet another question is, Shall we collide with some other heavenly body ? The whole solar system is travelling towards the constellation of Hercules at about the rate of four solar distances in the year. But there is nothing that we know of dangerously near,—our author gives us some billions of years as a probable lease of life. As to solar recuperation, he rejects the "meteorite food" theory, as it may be called. It is radium that is saving us from secular frost. "The decomposition of radium into its final products is accompanied by a heat evolu- tion of about two thousand millions of caloric per gramme." So we have the comforting prospect that "the chemical energy of the sun will be sufficient to sustain the solar heat during many thousand millions and possibly billions of years to come." We can give but the very crudest notion of the contents of this remarkable volume. Anything like an expert judgment would be a very serious matter indeed.
Previous page
