Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1881 — Curious Calculations. [ARTICLE]

Curious Calculations.

If we suppose the distance between the earth and the sun (about ninety-two and one-third millions of miles) to be reduced to a dozen rods or more, the size of the two globes to be reduced in the same proportion, the distance from the earth to the nearest fixed star would still be, on the same scale, about 9,000 miles, and to the more distant ones it would be not less than 18,000,000 miles. From those more distant stars the light must travel for sixty centuries before it reaches us—and yet light travels so fast that it would circle round the earth more than seven times in a single second of time. If the sun could be reduced, in imagination, to 1-100 of an inch in diameter, the earth would then be of microscopic size, about 1-10,000 of au inch, but the distance between it and the nearest star would not be less than three miles. If the sun were a hollow sphere and the earth were placed at its center, with the moon revolving around it in its established orbit, there would still be a distance of 200,000 miles from the lunar orbit to the surface of the solar sphere. If these relations of size and distance are inconceivable, the forces which compel the planets to move in their elliptical orbits are quite as much beyond our comprehension. A bar of steel three inches square will sustain a weight of 640 tons, but a bar having a section of 144 square inches would sustain 8,940 tons, which upon a railroad would require 864 cars to support it and twentythree locomotives to transport it. To deflect the moon from a straight course into its present orbit, or, what is the same thing, to retain it in its present course, would require the united strength of not less than eight steel bars, each 100 miles square, or, more accurately, a single bar whose section is 87,600 square miles—more than large enough to cover the States of New York and Ohio together. If this force were represented by a web of steel wires, each one-quarter of an inch in diameter, stretched from the earth to the moon, they would be distributed over our earth on the moon side only six inches apart, and if a similar web were stretched from the earth to tho sun the foroe exerted between these two bodies would require the wires to cover one side of the earth as close together as blades of grass upon a lawn. — Prof. C. B. Waring.