The Source and Mode of Solar Energy Throughout the Universe

by Isaac W. Heysinger

We have thus traced the genesis of a solar system from its earliest stages forward through its various changes until, complete and in working order, it is ready to be sent on its eternal course, either alone or as one of a vast congeries of similar systems, like the Milky Way. (See frontispiece for illustration of a series of types of development from a straight-tailed comet, through different curvatures, and spiral nebulæ of less and less divergence, until nearly circular, and finally terminating in a complete solar system.) These processes of creation may be isolated, or they may flash a hundred million solar systems into being together, as crystals flash forth in the rock; but, when once formed, they go forth each as eternal as space itself.

But can we not go back one step farther still in the progressive stages of creative energy? Whence came these powerful agencies by means of which all those distant regions became peopled with suns and worlds? The great source of all is to be found alone in space,—the so-called “empty space.” But it is far from empty; all through it are diffused the attenuated vapors which, condensed, constitute our suns and planets, and all that is, or ever shall be, gaseous vapors, which are held poised, with their opposite tensions of cohesion and expansion, like the Prince Rupert drops which glass-blowers make for toys,—a little bulb of glass, chilled as it falls, molten, in a vessel of water. From one extremity projects a long, crooked stem, scarcely thicker at the end than a horse-hair, spun out from the molten glass as it hung from the glass-blower’s rod. The bulbous body is as large, perhaps, as a nut; you can beat it with a hammer and it will not break; it is the hardest in structure of all glass. Now, wrap this bulb up in a thick handkerchief, or you may be injured; hold it firmly, and break off the very tiniest tip of the long stem three, four, or even six inches from the bulb. There is a sudden shock; open your handkerchief, and lo! instead of the solid bulb, there is only a loose mass of white powder. If you put the bulb in a heavy glass vessel full of water and break off the tip of the tail, it will shatter the vessel into fragments. What is the explanation?—it is, of course, well known—simply that the molecules of glass were instantly arrested in their motion of adjustment as the glass was suddenly chilled by the water, and the molecular motion of shrinkage was arrested, leaving the individual molecules under a tremendous strain of position in their endeavor to reach their true places. They are rigidly fixed in this position of unstable equilibrium, one balancing the other; but let a single molecule be displaced,—a fragment so tiny that the eye can scarcely see it,—and the molecules, thus thrown out of mutual support against each other, must now rearrange themselves from the ruptured rigid mass, and, like a row of stood-up bricks, each of which thrusts the other forward, with a sudden explosive force the molecules assume their true position of stable equilibrium, but it is at the cost of the whole structure. To this same cause we owe the explosive force of our gunpowder, nitroglycerin, and all explosives; the molecules are held in unstable equilibrium, and the tension once relieved at a single point, be it ever so infinitesimal, the molecules of the whole mass rearrange themselves with explosive energy. Strange that so harmless a substance as glycerin, by the mere replacement of an atom of nitrogen gas, should develop the energy of dynamite under a trifling molecular shock.

So, also, the aqueous and perhaps other vapors of all space, attenuated though they be, and perhaps by reason of this very tenuity itself, as shown by the experiments of Professor Crookes with attenuated gases when acted upon by electricity, are held in the same state of unstable equilibrium. We know the potency of this instability from the terrific explosive combination of the gases which combine to form aqueous vapor. We may again refer to one of the well-known experiments of Professor Crookes with simple atmospheric air. Enclosed in a cylindrical glass vessel, the electric spark passed freely; as it became more rarefied under an air-pump, new phenomena appeared, until, at a stage of high rarefaction, the molecules of these gases were driven forward by the electric current with such energy as first to raise the temperature of the opposite side of the cylinder to a red heat, then to melt, and finally to perforate the glass. The explanation is that the movements of closely aggregated molecules mutually interfere with each other; as they gain elbow-room by being reduced in number, they act with more directness, and consequently with more force: it is the difference between men fighting in a crowded room and out in an open field. It is possible that these molecular tensions of space, by the ready unlocking of the forces with which they are charged, may even aid in the rotation of the planets by acting upon their electrospheres in their drift through space, as charged thunder-clouds react upon each other, or the molecules of atmospheric air, in moderately high vacua, under electrical excitement, act upon the walls of the containing vessel, as in the experiments of Professor Crookes and others. The riddles of nature are like those of the sphinx,—they have more than one meaning.

The tensions of the aggregated molecules of space are thus counterbalanced only so long as all space is equally occupied and a state of perfect quiescence exists in its every part. A molecular disturbance in one part is immediately communicated to adjacent parts, and finally to all. With the first movement, gravity asserts itself, for gravity exists and must exist in all parts, and must actively manifest itself whenever the perfect mutual balance of space is disturbed and a center of energy developed, and co-ordinately with the action of gravity begins that of electricity. Movements among the molecules are converted into movement of mass; centripetal motion begets condensation, this begets sensible heat and vortical movement; then come the phenomena of electrical generation by moving contact with the gases of space, then repulsion and disassociation of the elements of the aqueous vapors, combination of simple into compound elements; and, the balance once disturbed, the state of unstable equilibrium is forever destroyed, and all space henceforth must exhibit constant change. There are whole segments of space absolutely blank, so far as visible systems are concerned, which seem to have been exhausted, for the present æons at least, to supply material for the vast adjacent galaxies which extend along their borders; see illustrations in Proctor’s “Essays on Astronomy,” article “Distribution of the Nebulæ.”

It need not be supposed that such stage of perfect and universal quiescence ever existed in fact; it is like the Nirvana of the Buddhist philosophers,—a subjective and not an objective condition. We can have no knowledge of the existence, even, of material things, save from their phenomena, the manifestation of interchanging forces, upon which rests our threefold basis of knowledge, perception, cognition, and comparison. We know nothing of matter, except as affected by internal or external force, nor of force itself, except as it acts in one mode or another upon matter. All beyond this is, for us, without form and void.

Progressive change has always, doubtless, been the universal law of creation, and the great ocean of space is, and ever has been, and ever will be the highway through which perpetually plough the great caravels which bear the fortunes of creative energy, laden with life and light and heat, in their eternal progression. The creative impulse once given, if it, too, was not primeval in the eternal past, must have gone on from development to development, like the transmission of life, from age to age and from realm to realm. “The mills of the gods grind slowly;” in these vast areas time is absolutely nothing; the processes we see are but as the dip of a swallow’s wing compared with an inconceivable futurity; but all our energies, and all the energies of planets and suns and systems and galaxies, and of whatever other and wider created forms may stretch onward to infinity, came forth from the ocean of space, and to this ocean all these energies continue to return again in ceaseless circuit.

Can we indicate any relationship of periodicity for the genesis of solar systems from space? There is a remarkable example of a somewhat similar periodicity in organic life for the rupture of tensions, so common that its analogous character and perfect regularity are scarcely even thought of. Among the highest species of mammalia we find that, in a state of health, whether resident of the heights of the Andes, the deserts of Africa, the jungles of India, or the most densely populated centers of London; among rich or poor, high or low, idle or industrious, virtuous or vicious, ancient or modern, civilized or barbarous, black, white, red, or yellow, the ovum of the mature female rises to the surface of the ovary, and at intervals, almost uniform, of twenty-eight days, organic excitement ensues, the enclosing vesicle is ruptured, and the ovum escapes. The remarkable feature is not that these processes continuously succeed each other; but that under such diverse conditions and opposite circumstances, and with two separate ovaries operating at the same time, simultaneously or successively, this almost miraculous interval of no more and no less than twenty-eight days between the successive ruptures of tension and their attendant phenomena, should constantly persist. For its ultimate cause we must look back to the vis a tergo to which we have already alluded; and there may be, and doubtless is, a similarly acting remote cause which regulates the periodical development of solar systems or of galaxies, periods of intense activity, followed by intervals of exhaustion and recuperation, and again succeeded by another period of activity, and so on perpetually, for space is perpetual, infinite, and inexhaustible.

It will be observed that the processes above roughly sketched are somewhat similar to those observed in the formation of so-called water-spouts, which usually terminate in dissipation in the atmosphere, or else in terrific thunder-storms, but which occasionally reach a sufficient energy of rotation to spin their central nuclei down towards, or even to, the surface of the sea, or, in desert regions, to that of the ground. There is no analogy with the theoretical and “assumed” primal mass of attenuated plasma of the nebular theory, or with its slow initial rotation, with the successive casting off of rings of nebulous matter. It may sometimes happen, however, that the repulsive electrical energy of the central nucleus may throw off its external envelopes with sufficient force to drive them entirely beyond the effective limit of its attractive forces, as occurs in the formation of embryonic comets as above described; in such case the nebula will be a variable one, with successively repeated aggregations and successive outbursts, periodical like the active stages of volcanoes; and, even when the nucleus has already presented a continuous solar spectrum, its energies may be thus expended, or more gradually, and finally dissipated like the electricity of a highly charged Leyden jar exposed to a moist atmosphere.

As a bottle of strongly effervescing liquid may blow itself empty, when suddenly opened, by the mutually repellent energy of its contained molecules, so if such a phenomenon were manifested in a radial direction from a central point, the repelled spray would show itself as a nebulous ring with a hollow center. An example of this sort is shown in the multiple-tailed “Catherine-wheel” nebula (Fig. 4 of a previous illustration). If such an annular nebula should become ruptured into two portions by internal repulsion, the electrical polarity of the smaller fragment would be reversed, and the two arcs would separately coalesce and consolidate into a sun and a single planet, forming a solar system like that of Algol, which has been already described. Otherwise, the nebula would probably retrograde and disappear, by diffusion, into space again. We may expect to find abortive efforts of nature here, as we so constantly find them elsewhere, not merely in inorganic matter, but even among the processes of life.

In Professor Proctor’s article (“Essays on Astronomy”) on the square-shouldered aspect of Saturn, he mentions a hitherto unexplained circumstance of the earth’s atmosphere—the curious fact that the barometrical pressure of the earth’s atmosphere is somewhat higher between the poles and the equator than immediately over the latter, as might be supposed to be the case. This is a phenomenon of mutual repulsion similar to those manifested in the operations above described. The rotation of the earth on its axis forces the terrestrial atmosphere, by its centrifugal motion, in undue proportion, around the equatorial belt, causing the same sort of atmospheric thinning at the poles which we see in the solar photosphere at its corresponding parts. At the same time the highly electrified atmosphere, by its mutually repellent action, tends to force this swollen equatorial ring backward toward the poles. The resultant of these two repulsions is an area of maximum density part way between the poles and the equator. It is probable that this self-repellent equatorial swell may play some part in the sun’s atmosphere, in extending, and also in limiting, the areas of eruptive sun-spots outward from his equator.