The Destinies of the Stars

By Svante Arrhenius, Ph.D. President, Nobel Institute, Stockholm, Sweden (Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1903)
Authorized Translation from the Swedish By J. E. Fries Fellow A.I.E.E.
Illustrated
G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press 1918
Copyright, 1918 BY G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
When Dr. Svante Arrhenius in the year 1903 received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry it came as a fitting reward of his achievements principally in the electro-chemical field. It was natural, however, that a genius of his calibre would not limit his interest to the “infinitely small” but would gradually broaden it to encompass the “infinitely large.” And “to take an interest” means with Dr. Arrhenius to push the boundaries of the unknown and of the unexplored a little farther away from man. His evolution in this respect runs parallel with that of all the great men who stand out as leaders in the history of science. Wrapt up in the solution of a particular problem and fired with the divine yearning to reach ultimate causes they are inevitably driven to ever widening circles of research until this whole material universe, its whence and whither, becomes the overpowering passion of their spirits. Thus the mere titles of the works of Dr. Arrhenius, read in the sequence of their publication, give us, better than any biography, the history of a soul, which, no matter what his unprofessed philosophical faith may be, constitutes our strongest evidence in favour of that theory of “purposiveness” in the universe which Dr. Arrhenius so heartily abhors (and justly so) when resorted to in natural science, but which theory nevertheless (and justly so) is so dear to the philosopher:— Researches in Regard to the Conductivity of Electrolytes; Conductivity of Extremely Diluted Solutions; Chemical Theory of Electrolytes; Textbook in Theoretical Electro-Chemistry; Textbook in Cosmological Physics; Worlds in the Making; Infinity of the Universe; Life of the Universe as Conceived by Man from Earliest Ages to the Present Time ;—thus run the titles of a few of the works we already have by Dr. Arrhenius’ hand. How were it possible for him NOT to write The Destinies of the Stars ? The volume came as inevitably as fruition follows flowering. What remains to be seen is if Dr. Arrhenius can withstand the tremendous temptation that must be at work in his soul to lift, be it ever so little, the curtain that separates natural science and philosophy; we hope he will give in; we admire in this book how he reads “The Riddle of the Milky Way”; we certainly wish to know how he reads—the riddle of the universe.