Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 August 1876 — A Chapter on Heat—The New Theory. [ARTICLE]

A Chapter on Heat—The New Theory.

The recent protracted spell of fervid heat has among us sown a fearful harvest of apprehension and death. The learned and unlearned have asked what this unprecedented month of scorching might mean. The sun, whose restless activity our race has witnessed for a few centuries, whose eclipses have lieen eagerly scanned and photographed, does not appear to be the sort of sun we have all along pictured. Up to a very recent date scientists have universally described our central luminary as an immense globe composed of materials similar to those we find in the crust of oilr earth, but in a condition of intense combustion, and that this combustion is supported by incessant showers of meteoric matter, disintegrated planets and the like. This theory of the central solar fire, the warming furnace of wintry space, so to speak, implied a terrific consumption of cosmic fuel. Were our earth suddenly to overcome its centrifugal force and rush in a swift curve prone to the sun, it has been estimated that the fuel thus supplied would not have a more appreciable or enduringeffect on the solar head than a shovelful of coals thrown into an immense engine furnace. Indeed to maintain the sun’s heat a shower of planetary matter thick as hailstones in a furious storm, and large as our most towering mountains, must be falling incessantly on the solar surface. This indicates a terribly prodigal waste of stellar material?: Yet, if. there is any analogy in nature, we know that this supposition of waste is entirely averse to nature’s revealed laws. Bo much is this a fact that we are accustomed to speak of the “ economy of nature.” Hence, a certain advanced school of scientists have recently been led to question this “central furnace theory” of the sun. For they reasonably argue that even presuming there was this terrible consumption of cosmic fuel in every second of time, and granting that the sun is as large a globe as we know it to be, yet at his instance from us—over 91,000,000 of miles—it would be impossible to project through this space to us any appreciable portion of his heat. Take the largest fire that any one has seen in his individual experience. How far distant was its heat felt? Take the Chi-

cago fire, or the Boston fire; how comparatively short a distance had a person to walk to be relieved of the heat that was generated by them! Were all the coal contained in the bowels of the earth built into a gigantic pyramid, and thorough combustion induced, no one can imagine, on reflection, that the heat proceeding from it would scorch a person ten miles distant. The hottest fire we can build in a grate does not appreciably warm the carpet a few feet distant and below it. All the heat we have knowledge or experience bf rises—it does not descend. How, then, ask those modern scientists, can the sun force its heat down to us through a distance of ninety-one millions of miles? Just here, however, the religious mind is filled with horror. This theory of the scientist is regarded as a positive denial of the power of the Deity. Unabashed, the philosopher asks the believer to produce his authority to show that the sun is anywhere declared to be, in the Bible, a burning globe supplying us with heat. The latter turns to the record of creation, in Genesis, and discovers that “ God said let there be light.” The former replies, “ Yes; when the Creator, after having assembled in their respective positions the materials which compose the planetary and stellar worlds, uttered the words, let there be light, he called into existence a power which became the generator of all the physical forces which control and regulate the world. It has hitherto been the custom to declare the sun’s intense heat as the cause of light; now we propose to reverse the order, and directly attribute our terrestrial heat to the sun’s light, believing the sun to be no fiery furnace of* the system it governs.” This is a startling theory, but already there are some remarkable names linked with it. They maintain that light is matter, and that the vast interval between our planet and the sun is filled with a material medium—ether, or whatever it may be called—which, according to Pouillet, has a temperature of minus 142 degrees centigrade, or minus 223.6 degrees Fahren-. heit thermometer. « Light passing* through this with a velocity of 186,000 miles per second everywhere produces enormous friction. Friction produces electricity. It is electricity, and its correlative magnetism which form those Titanic forces of nature and produce those changes and convulsions on our planet that meet us at every turn. The hurricane, the tornado, the thunderbolt, the earthquake, the volcano, the crash of planets, night of meteors, the fiery parabolas of comets—in short, the gigantic throbbings and pulsations of all matter in cosmic space are the direct result of the omnipotent energy of this mysterious agent. The “.heat” that overwhelms us or strikes us dead is but a charge of electricity. Prof. Tyndall recently’ published a work on “ Heat;” and in the chapter on “ Solar Radiation" that eminent scientist shows that he is behind the latter-day school of philosophers. He says: “ Never did I suffer so much from solar heat as when descending from the corridor to the grand plateau of Mount Blanc. While 1 sunk up to the waist m snow, the sun darted its rays upon me with intolerable fierceness. On entering the shade of the Dome du Goute, these impressions instantly changed, for the air was as cold as ice. It was not really much colder than the air traversed by the solar rays, and I suffered not from contact with warm air, but from the stroke of the sun’s rays, which reached me after passing through a medium as cold as ice.”

It seems strange, say the modem theorists, that it did not occur to so astute a scientist as Tyndall that if his distressing sensations were derived from the sun’s tierce rays he could not have walked waist deep through the snow in such heat without the snow becoming melted. Why did not the same heat which scorched him transform the snow into a torrent of water? But once assume that the sun has no heat and the explanation of this and every other form of solar phenomena is simple. The heat Prof. Tyndall suffered from was evoLedfrom his own body. It was derived from the electrical action of sunlight upon his dark woolen clothes, warmed by the animal heat of his system. His woolen clothes had become by violent exercise positively electrified by the heat of his body. The sunlight by its friction with them 'wasalso positively electrified, increased heat was evolved in and around his person, and his sufferings were intensified. As soon as he left the sunlight his clothes, by induction, became negatively electrified, and the temperature of his body was rapidly reduced. If the sun possessed heat, our theorists say, and could force that heat downward to the earth, which, according to our knowledge of the laws of heat, is impossible, we could have no clouds in our atmosphere, because the clouds would be so expanded and attenuated by the absorbed heat that they could never be formed.

The sun is a great magnet, as undoubtedly are all the planets of his system and the stars and satellites of other systems. There is only sufficient heat g< nerated in the interior of the sun by opposite electricities to canse its rotation on its axis. The sup can not be an incandescent body, Itecause magnetism is destroyed by heat. Such, in brief, is the new revelation of science, and as there does not appear to be any natural phedomena which can not be explained by it, there is every probability of its almost general acceptance. Assuming this new theory, we perceive the identity of action between the thunderstorm and the volcano, or the earthquake, or the “ sun-stroke,” as we term It. We

can see how the planet that once comprehended the asteroids of our system was rent asunder previous to historic times. The mystery of Jupiter’s terrible surface disturbance admits of easy solution, and the mysterious disappearance of Biela’s comet receives an explanation. This last catastrophe was so remarkable that it may not be unprofitable to briefly recall it. Biela’s comet had returned with perfect regularity every six years. Its elements were accurately determined and its orbit definitely ascertained. It was reckoned just as regular in its course as the earth, Venus, Jupiter, br the sun Itself. In 1846 it appeared as usual; but even while the telescopes of astronomers were directed to it, by some sudden convulsion it burst in half, leaving two comets at a considerable distance from each other in the place of one. These two comets preserved their orbits, and in due course disappeared. In 1852 the two comets appeared in the same relative position as they had disappeared six years before In 1857 they again returned, though there was a less favorable opportunity furnished for observing them, owing to their being in that portion of the heavens near to the sun. In 1866 there came no comet; nor in 1873. They had disappeared, burst into fragments, or joinea themselves (as steel filings jump at and cling to a magnet) to some planet or the sun itself. The comet of Biela had run its eourse; it had performed its mission. An overcharge of magnetism had occasioned a sovereign cataclysm, and it was scattered in fragments through space. These stellar ■ catastrophes are not without their analogies in the history of our own planet, and are believed to form a regular process in the “ economy of nature.” One section of humanity expects the millennium. Another looks for a fearful exhibition of power, in which the earthquake and every possible form of Titanic convulsion will be called in action, resulting in the fragments of our globe becoming for a few moments fuel for the sun. But the scientists who uphold the new theory of heat, who see in "the torrid experiences of the past four weeks a great exhibition of electrical force, while recognizing the extreme probability of an impending convulsion, see a natural cause for it as well as a use for it. Sir William Thompson, the famous English scientist, recently suggested the possibility that “ vegetable and animal life had been introduced upon our earth by the downfall qf the fragments of old worlds. ’ ’ And Dr. Sterry’ Hunt has pointed to evidence which shows that “ large meteoric globes have fallen upon our planet in prehistoric ages, containing hydro-carbons, indicating unmistakably that they were clothed with vegetation when they fell.” Taking these two remarkable statements together, the latterday scientistaadvance the theory that the mission of our globe is to cany vegetable and animal life to other planets in space, and that the scriptural promise that the faithful shall “meet their Lord in the air” is no figure of speech. By a crowning electric convulsion, resembling a phenomenal thunder storm magnified ten million times, the earth will burst into a myriad fragments. The internal fire will shoot into space like a molten stream and form a new comet to terrify and astonish the astronomers of other constellations. The solid portions of the crust will dash through space—some like meteors and others like asteroids—and carry the life of our globe to stellar solitudes, which will then receive the new command to “ increase and multiply.” The flood was a type of the coming cataclysm, and even as Noah and his family were the only persons saved, so from the nature of the explosion of our world but few will be fortunate enough to find their lot cast in an fragment as large as Vesta or Juno.— New York Mercury.