THE SCRIBE'S NOTE ON CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It is remarkable that man has been able to discover what the distant stars are made of.
Our knowledge concerning the chemistry of the stars has been obtained by means of the spectroscope, in which a beam of light from the star is passed through a glass prism.
The result is the well-known image of the coloured spectrum, in which certain well-defined lines appear, according to the distant elements originating the æther waves.
The electron explains the whole subject from its own point of view.
It is only within recent times that man has observed that we send messages from the distant stars to this planet. But there is nothing new to us in this proceeding; we have been busy sending these messages ever since the solar system was formed. Through all those ages we have kept on sending these messages, knowing that in time man must come to take notice of them.
If the subject should happen to be new to you, you will be anxious to know to what kind of messages I refer. Needless to say, they are wireless messages—waves in the great æther ocean. The waves, to which I refer specially, fall within that small range of which I told you something in the preceding chapter. In other words, they are those waves to which man has given the name light. But what special information do these waves, coming from the stars, convey to man? They tell him of what materials these distant stars are made. Needless to say, it is we electrons who produce those informative waves.
You are familiar with our method of producing waves. You know that we whirl around the atoms of matter at prodigious speeds, and that according to the number of revolutions we make per second, we produce waves of corresponding frequencies.
In an earlier chapter I have hinted that the speed of the revolving electron is determined by the kind of atom to which it acts as a satellite. For instance, when electrons revolve around iron atoms they produce certain wave-lengths, while those moving around hydrogen atoms produce an entirely different series of waves. But how is man to recognise these?