Golden Age, February 17, 1932

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A JOURNAL OF FACT HOPE AND COURAGE

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every other

WEDNESDAY

five cents a copy one dollar a, year Canada & Foreign 1.25

Vol. Xin No. 324

February 17, 1932

CONTENTS

LABOR AND ECONOMICS

No Local City Taxes .... 305 Wages for Maintenance of Way 305 Hard Times Crowd Hospitals . 306 San Francisco's Unemployed

Women

What Milwaukee Has Done . . 308 Sad Conditions in Baltimore . . 310 Madness of New World's

Economics

Belief: 1931 Style

social and educational

This, That and T’other .... 305 Food at Cent a Dish

Farm Board Loses Millions . . 305 75c for Seven Lambs .... 305 Ten Years of Peace Conferences 306 Minnesota’s Building Program . 306 Forty Deaths from Football . . 306 Plans for Knickerbocker Village 307 Migration from United States . 307 Assumption of Risk.....307

What the Government Could Do 309 Hurrah for Borrelli! .... 309

Can’t Tell Where They Got Money 310

Psychology of War Debts . . . 311

Rhyme for the Children . . . 313

Chicago-Los Angeles over Night 306

Westbound Atlantic Travel Cut 306

Big Incomes Are Too Big . . . 307

S. N. E. Fishermen’s Association 308

Voyage of Roald Amundsen . . 309

Appetite of Big Business . . . 309

List of Defaulting Countries . . 310

Rothschilds Burned Coffee . . 310

POLITICAL—DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN

Hapgood in Council Bluffs . . 307

War Is Wicked......312

Ratti Makes Too Much Noise . 312

SCIENCE AND INVENTION

Propulsive Power of Light . . 291

Machine Sorts Cards Numerically 307

Sehminkus Detonating Ray . . 308

Phoning over Beam of Light . . 308

Rubber Tires and Pavements . 309

Voice of the Sky......310

TRAVEL AND MISCELLANY

What Friends of Soviet Claim . 306

China Buries Writers Alive . . 308

Automobile Plant at Nizhni Novgorod........309

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

FINANCE—COMMERCE—TRANSPORTATION

2,342 Bank Failures in Year . . 305

Automobiling 6c a Mile .... 305

“Ain’t This Something?” . . 312

Hail Jehovah of Hosts! . . . 314

The Radio Witness Work . . . 319

Published every other Wednesday at 117 Adams Street, Brooklyn, N. Y., U. S. A., by WOODWORTH, KNORR & MARTIN

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Golden Age

Volume XIII Brooklyn, N. Y., Wedne«Aty, February 17, 1932 Number 324

The Propulsive Power of Light By E. Charman (Quebec)

(With, an Interrogation and a Reply)

FOR a number of years I have been a reader of The Golden Age, and I often get from it information that would not be found in any other publication. I was greatly interested in the article in issue of April 1, 1931, “Consider the Heavens.”

For a long time I have been convinced that the astronomy which passes current today is almost as faulty as the prevailing religious doctrines and theories. Thinking that your readers might be interested in an astronomy that seems more reasonable and understandable and which gives more credit and more glory to the God whom we all worship, I wondered if you would not like to have us “consider the heavens” by and through the assistance which your columns might afford, particularly that little corner of the heavens apportioned to the solar system.

The following remarks are offered in the hope that you will put them into print and that some of your readers may be interested. My quarrel with astronomy as taught in the schools today is, first and foremost, in regard to gravitation. On it we are led to believe the processes and stability of the universe depend. And yet we are unable to obtain one proof or scrap of evidence that gravitation, of the Newtonian sort, has more real existence than Santa Claus or the fairies.

Of course we know that small articles are impelled to move toward the earth, but that they and the earth are attracted toward each other cannot be shown. There is nothing to indicate that a force is moving and acting from within the earth to draw small material things toward it.

A very recent scientific writer speaks of electrified particles, of which atoms are built up, sending out feelers or tentacles called lines of force to the bounds of space to pull upon other particles located in the far distance; but no such extensions of the particles make themselves evident to us. Those particles must have wonderful power plants within themselves to enable them to put out even the smallest sort of arms to the regions of the stars, billions of miles away. The idea is much like that of a certain religious sect, which holds that we do not see by means of light reflected from a distance, but that our eyes send out feelers, in perfectly straight fines, to objects that we cannot reach with our hands; and these feelers inform us about the distant objects by the sense of feeling and not by another sense, that of sight. These people think that the earth is flat! Well, the modern scientist does not think the earth is flat; but is not this belief in the tentacles, or feelers, of the atom quite as childish?

Scientists cannot give us evidence of anything whatever reaching out from the atoms, particles or larger items of material substance. The evidence seems to be that articles said to be “attracted” are really not pulled from within the earth, but are pushed from without. We do not ask anyone to take this as a child must take a fairy tale: without any evidence except the child’s faith in our veracity. We have evidence of something moving toward the earth, all the time, day and night. That something is light, and it has been proven to be moving at the almost unthinkable speed of about 186,000 miles a second. If light is a flight of small material particles, or corpuscles, as Newton called them, those corpuscles must be very small indeed. When they are not in motion we cannot see them. When they are in motion they may strike in our eyes and cause the sensation of sight.

If light, as Newton supposed, is a flow, or ray, of material particles, flying at a tremendous speed those material particles must have some weight and push. If they are continually striking an article up in the air, a stalled aero-

plane, let us say, they will, either quickly or slowly, force it to earth. The light will not be striking from below, because the earth stops the light from that direction. It will strike from all sides, and from the top, but not from the bottom. The average direction will be in a line to the center of the earth, straight down, as we call it; and that is the direction falling bodies take. The light is coming all the time, day and night. A single star sends rays to every part of the surface of the earth facing it. Some scientists have claimed to be able to measure the weight and heat of a ray coming from one of the fixed stars. They would perhaps measure the weight of the light striking a surface of the size of a silver dollar, and might find it only one-billionth of an ounce. Not much power in that; but remember that the light of a star strikes all over a hemisphere of the earth, and that would include many more than a billion faces of the size of a dollar, so that the pressure against the whole earth is considerable, probably hundreds of ounces. And then there are many millions of stars shedding their light upon us. The air is said to be pressed against the earth to a weight of fifteen pounds to the square inch. If light has weight it may well be the one that is doing the pressing.

There is something about light, of the corpuscular, or material, kind that you may not have thought ofr It could cause stars, suns and moons to rotate and revolve! And this valuable quality is entirely lacking in attraction. What is there in attraction to cause a globe suspended in space to rotate? Absolutely nothing.

And you may say, “Well, out in space, light would strike a planet equally on all sides, and how can its pushing power be made to turn the planet in one direction and not in the other?”

Ah! there is where light differs from attraction; and there is where the new astronomy, which we hope to consider in the columns of The Golden Age, differs from any astronomy which has ever been taught anywhere. It tells what causes both the rotation and the revolution of the heavenly bodies: stars, suns, moons and planets.

A little later I will quote the statement of a well known modern scientist to the effect that science has absolutely no explanation of the origin or continuance of planetary rotation.

For the present, take it from me that no reasonable explanation of such rotation can be given by anyone, in harmony with the prevailing astronomical ideas which include “attraction of gravitation” as an important astronomical function.

Before we go further, it might be well for me, not actually to build, but to imagine a mechanical illustration of the propagation and action of light. An eminent scientific writer has very recently used the popping of corn in a hot pan to illustrate the disintegration of radium, one kernel popping at a time, and not all exploding together; so perhaps I may be permitted to make use of the same homely means of illustration. But I will have to assign to the kernels of corn some unusual qualities, as unusual and almost as wonderful as the qualities attributed by scientists, in the not very distant past, to the “luminiferous ether”, which ether is now pretty generally admitted to be altogether nonexistent.

To start with, the kernels will have to represent particles of material that may be turned into light; as bits of the wick of a candle, of wood or coal or any inflammable substance. The interiors of the kernels we will suppose to be packed with small, hard, round pellets, like little bullets or shot. And we must imagine them soaked in some highly explosive substance, like nitroglycerine. And we imagine the pellets held together by an outer coating very similar to the hull of an actual kernel of corn. Now we imagine a large metal pan and place on the bottom of it a layer of the kernels a few inches in depth; and in some way we must cement these together in a solid block. That done, we have ready a small imitation light-producing plant. Apply a lighted match to one of the kernels in the top layer and it will explode with great violence and scatter the little pellets outward in all directions. The explosion of the first kernel causes another, or perhaps a number of the nearer ones, to explode and scatter' the pellets with which they were filled, as did the first one. And these again cause still others to explode, and so on, kernel after kernel. They do not all explode at once, but keep on like little bits of wood in a fire, individual particles burning up and communicating the flame to other particles. There would be an almost constant stream of the little pellets issuing from the exploding kernels. There would, however, be some distance in time and space between the pellets from the different explosions. All the pellets are the same, but some may have been blown away more violently and therefore at greater speed than others.

We cannot think that the light of a candle travels with the speed of sunlight. Even if particles of light start out at the same speed, the different experiences which they will encounter in their journey will change their velocities. One little corpuscle of light goes through clear air, another through smoky glass; one through a piece of cheese, and another through muddy water. These substances all slow the speed, but at different rates. Different velocities may be recognized by the various color impressions made in the eyes. Our eyes are constructed for only a limited range of light velocities.

The lowest band of velocities which the eyes are capable of using in what we call sight produces a sensation which we name “red”; the next appreciable higher band of speeds we call “orange”, and then follow “yellow”, “green,” “blue,” “indigo” and “violet”. But there are rates of speed below the reds (the infra-red), and rates above the violets (the ultra-violets), which make no impression on our eyes. Although light is material, there may be wave lengths to consider, the wave length denoting either the time or the distance between the shower of bullets which, as we noted, do not all start out together as in one grand explosion, but come from each “kernel” separately.

A few years ago the scientists were pretty well agreed that light was nothing substantial, but a mere condition of waves, or ripples, in an all-pervading ether. Now many of them believe light is (or is caused by) a flow of material but exceedingly minute particles (called by Newton “corpuscles”). We need not mention those who believe it to be both waves and corpuscles: (as some one has said) waves three days of the week, then corpuscles three days, and both on Sundays. The wave theory of light could not possibly account for any of the supposed functions of gravitation; could not move the earth or the planets or displace perceptibly even a small particle of dust.

But in the corpuscular form of light, the streams of little round “bullets” coming with unthinkable velocity could (and do) move the earth and planets and stars.

Now that scientists have gotten rid of the ether, we can think of the earth suspended in empty space, hung upon nothing,’ as Job expresses it. It would not take very much force to move it to one side or the other of its regular orbit. A pressure of half a ton against one side, with nothing pressing on the opposite side, would, in time, change the course of the orbital flight. Or the removal of half a ton of the usual pressure would have the same sort of effect, in an opposite direction. And the rushing flood of the little “bullets” of light would, in one second, very far exceed the half ton I have used in my illustration.

And now we must answer the question which readers will no doubt have in their minds: How can revolution and rotation be caused by the power of light? Well, you probably know, or can understand, that a slow-moving bullet, from a gun, going through a wooden target would cause much more push against the target than a more speedy bullet of the same size. And if a lot of the slower-moving little light bullets were striking and going through a fringe of materials around the outer edge on one side pf a planet and a lot of swifter-moving little bullets were striking and going through the same fringe from the opposite side, there would be more push on the side receiving the slow bullets than on the side receiving the swifter ones, and every ounce of weight pushing on either side would have an effect. A. small push long continued would eventually move the earth, or a great push would move it in a shorter time. If there is no ether in space (as is now believed by many), if space is practically empty and void of friction, it would not take very much power to move even an object as large as the earth. It is its momentum that keeps it free from influences of little pushes this way or that. Without momentum the striking of a big meteor might start our globe moving out of its usual course.

If starlight is cut off from one side of the earth by the presence of a planet or moon, the pressure on that side is reduced and the earth moves slightly toward the obstructing body, and scientists observe what they take to be “attraction” by the latter.

The position of Neptune was calculated before that planet was actually discovered; calculated by the effect it had in changing the orbit of Uranus. This was accounted a great triumph for the theory of gravitation, but it might as well have been figured out as due to reduction of light push by reason of the presence of a body obstructing the light in that part of the heavens.

From whatever cause the earth started in rotation (considered later), we find it now whirling on its axis at a speed of about 1,000 miles an hour.

A planet, or moon, once started in rotation will be kept going indefinitely, and the speed will be all the time increased until it reaches its limit. That limit will not be the full speed of light, because light flashing in an opposite direction will act as a brake, and slow down the rotating body.

Solid and smooth globes will respond to the slowing power of the brake much more readily than the spongy, liquid or gaseous globes, whose penetrable edges are greater in proportion. Light strikes the side that is turning away from it at a slower speed of impact than it strikes the side that is coming toward it. The light striking the projections from the sides of a planet or moon, such as trees and other vegetation, houses, barns, small hills, waves of the ocean, air, etc., goes right through (at least much of it does); and the light striking the on-coming side goes through quicker, and with less friction, than the light striking the receding side. There is consequently much more of a push on the receding side than on the approaching one, and the rotation is thereby kept up, and increased.

Planets whose mass is great, in proportion to their weight, rotate much more rapidly than such solid globes as Venus, Earth and Mars. It takes each of the planets named close to twenty-four hours to perform one rotation, while the insubstantial, light-weight, vapory planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, turn once in from nine to eleven hours, although they are all larger than the earth.

Light striking the equator of a whirling globe acts like a belt on the rim of a wheel. The spongy, vapory planets have less weight to be rotated, and a greater surface for the light belt to pull On.

The revolution of a planet around its sun is just as much due to light propulsion as its rotation is.

The light striking in front of the planet in the course of its orbital flight will strike with a swifter impact than will the light striking from behind. It is the slow light that has the greater push; so the light from the rear pushes the planet along in spite of the opposing, swifter, light coming on in front. Our great earth is said to whirl along in its orbit at about eighteen miles a second; very much faster than any bullet was ever driven from the mouth of a gun. Remember, please, that it is the light which goes through a mere fringe of the surface that counts in motive power. Light sinking into the body of a planet, and not going through, need not be considered, as that from one side has just as much push as that from another side. The rays that go through the material obstruction count. Those that go through with most friction have the most push; those that fly through quickly, with least friction, have the least push. Invisible light and radio waves are now supposed to penetrate the earth for 30 miles or more.

The theory, then, is that the sun and fixed stars all send out light which has a pushing force, and the stars do not attract one another, as required by the old gravitation theory: they push each other away, and none of them ever come near enough to collide. That is a much pleasanter idea than having a dread that stars may rush together, drawn by the supposed power of attraction, and stage a collision of blazing ruin and destruction.

I have lately been reading Sir James Jeans’ book, The Mysterious Universe, which seems to be held in high esteem by those who believe in the gravitation theory, that is to say, by a great majority of the scientists and college men of today.

I am going to take the liberty of reviewing some of his statements, comparing them with the theories which seem to me to be more reasonable, and more likely to prove true, if a way is ever found to put them to proof.

Beginning on page 1 he says, “The vast majority of stars are wandering about in space . . . they travel through a universe so spacious that it is an event of almost unimaginable rarity for a star to come anywhere near to another star. For the most part each voyages in splendid isolation, like a ship on an empty ocean.”

How can that be if the stars attract one another1? Were they originally still more distant; and is each one now appreciating the attractiveness of the others, and striving to arrange a “get together” meeting?

Not so, he says! The universe is expanding, and stars moving rapidly apart. On page 70 we read “it has for some years been remarked that the remote spiral nebulae are, to all appearances, rushing away from the earth, and so presumably also from one another, at terrific speeds, which range up to 7200 miles a second. . . . The actual figures are important, because if we trace the implied nebular motions backwards, we find that all the nebulae must have been congregated in the neighborhood of the sun only a few thousands of millions of years ago. All this goes to suggest that we are living in an expanding universe, which started to expand only a few thousands of millions of years ago.”

The scientists tell whether a star is moving away from, or coming toward, the earth by the color of its light in the spectrum. If a star is rushing towards us the light which it sends out comes at greater speed than the average; if the star is receding from us the light comes at less than average speed. The slower rays are of a reddish color, and the swifter ones, violet, the various colors ranging themselves in the spectrum in the order of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. If the rays in the spectrum have a tendency to gather to the red end, the star sending it is likely to be moving away from us, and astronomers estimate the speed of its movements by the color of the rays received: the more ruddy, the less speed.

The fact that so eminent a scientist as Sir James believes that the stars are moving away from one another speaks little for the theory of gravitation (that every particle in the universe attracts every other particle).

I have already quoted his remark as to the unimaginable rarity of one star’s coming anywhere near to another, but he seems to think that at one time such an event did occur, and that to it is due the existence of the earth and all of the planets in the solar system.

On page 2 we read: “We believe, nevertheless, that some two thousand million years ago this rare event took place, and that a second star, wandering blindly through space, happened to come within hailing distance of the sun. Just as the sun and moon raise tides on the earth, so this second star must have raised tides on the surface of the sun. ... A huge tidal wave must have traveled over the surface of the sun, ultimately forming a mountain of prodigious height which would rise ever higher and higher as the cause of the disturbance came nearer and nearer. And before the second star began to recede its tidal-pull had become so powerful that this mountain was torn to pieces and threw off small fragments of itself much as the crest of a wave throws off spray. These small fragments have been circulating around their parent sun ever since. They are the planets, great and small, of which our earth is one.”

So now we know how the earth came into being. And we see how little Moses knew about it. At his school they probably never mentioned the star wandering blindly through space and getting so near our sun. Moses might well have gone to a night school where they taught my sort of doctrine: that one bright star simply cannot go near to another bright star, because both are pushing everything away by their heat and light rays. Sir James is even out of harmony with himself when he teaches that bright stars attract one another. Hear what he says on page 60: “Heat an ordinary six-inch cannonball up to fifty million degrees, the temperature of the center of the sun, and the radiation it emits would suffice to mow down, by its mere impact, like a jet of water from a fire hose, anyone who approached within fifty miles of it.” Now here would be something new: a six-inch star of the temperature of our medium-sized sun, and, far from attracting anything toward it, that little red-hot star by its repellent rays mows down everything within fifty miles! Sir James also tells us (page 61) of a meteorite that fell in Siberia in 1908. He says it “set up blasts of air which devastated the forests, over an enormous area”. Sir James has a great fund of facts like this at his command, but seems not to have learned what they, with such fierce energy, are trying to teach: that light and heat do not attract, but repel.

One other thing I would like to quote here, from his book, page 6: “Life can only exist inside a narrow temperate zone which surrounds each of these fires (stars) at a very definite distance. Outside these zones life would be frozen; inside it would be shriveled up. At a rough computation, these zones within which life is possible, all added together, constitute less than a thousand million millionth part of the whole of space. And even inside them, life must be of very rare occurrence, for it is so unusual an accident for suns to throw off planets, as our own sun has done, that probably only about one star in 100,000 has a planet revolving round it in the small zone in which life is possible. Just for this reason it seems incredible that the universe can have been designed primarily to produce life like our own; had it been so, surely we might have expected to find a better proportion between the magnitude of the mechanism and the amount of the product. At first glance at least, life seems to be an utterly unimportant by-product; we living things are somehow off the main line.”

Rather a gloomy horoscope for us! The only comfort I find in the writings of Sir James is that he doesn’t appear to believe himself very strongly. If his idea of the way that moons and planets come into being is correct there are likely to be very few of them outside the solar system: none for all we know, for no telescopes have been invented powerful enough to disclose whether or not the fixed stars are attended by planets such as are found in the solar system. But I utterly reject his cosmogony of the earth and the planets. I don’t believe our existence is due to the presence here of a blindly wandering star, running amuck through the heavens, and accidentally pulling out, by a gravitation that no star possesses, a portion of the sun, to be made over into planets.

The cosmogony of Moses leaves a chance that space may be plentifully supplied with planets. Most likely very many of the stars have their attendant satellites, teeming with life and happiness. We cannot go back to the old astrology that made the earth the center and most important point of the universe; neither can we, as reasonable creatures, think that our solar system is different from others, and the only abode of living creatures.

I beg to give one more quotation from Sir James relating to life on the earth and the planets. On page 14 he says: “To remain a possible abode of life, oui’ earth would need to move in, ever nearer and nearer to the dying sun. Yet science tells us that, so far from its moving inwards, inexorable dynamical laws are even now driving it ever further away from the sun into the outer cold and darkness. And so far as we can see, they must continue to do so until life is frozen off the earth, unless indeed some celestial collision or cataclysm intervenes to destroy life even earlier by a mure speedy death. This prospective fate is not peculiar to our earth; other suns must die like our own, and any life there may be on other planets must meet the same inglorious end.” This inglorious end is what Sir James finds written all across the sky, and in that he does not hesitate to disagree with the psalmist who wrote, some years before Sir James was born, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handywork.”—Ps. 19:1.

Sir James finds the sun throwing off by radiation the vast weight of 250,000,000 tons a minute (or about 4,000,000 tons a second). If that amount of material is thrown off with a great speed the sun cannot help but exercise a tremendous push against everything around it. And Sir James sees all, or nearly all, this material lost to our sun, and very little coming in from other stars to compensate for its loss. Does he think the material thrown off by suns goes away off into space, off into outer darkness, to be forever lost? The light theory of gravitation allows nothing to be lost. Every particle of light sent out eventually reaches some other star or planet. What is lost to one star is gained by another. If no star or planet intervenes the light goes on and on for millions of years; on and on until it does find a lodgment, so that matter is always conserved somewhere in the universe.

It is not necessary to suppose that our sun is growing smaller all the time. Only the radiation to the dark bodies, the planets, gives no return. They are growing all the time from the sun’s waste, and that of the stars, but the loose material of the solar system, meteors, etc., help to make up for the light loaned to the planets, and so the balance may be pretty well maintained, and the sun may go on lighting and warming our earth forever.

Now a few words as to astronomy of the solar system.

We might begin with the sun. It is supposed to be a great ball of fire, about 852,900 miles in diameter, and perfectly spherical. The sun’s density is said to be only one quarter that of the earth. Gravitation on the sun (the old kind) is figured as twenty-seven times as great as it is here, and an object dropped, near its surface, would fall 436 feet the first second. But if the light repulsion theory is correct an object like a block of wood, a hod of bricks, or a ton of coal would likely not fall at all. That 4,000,000 tons thrown off as radiation by the sun every second would prevent anything of ordinary weight from approaching its surface. Bodies as light as comets sometimes come as near as a million miles, but they never effect a landing; the sun’s radiation sends them flying away out into space without a stop.

The sun is said to rotate on its axis in about twenty-six days, its surface turning about 4,300 miles an hour, while the earth turns only about 1,000 miles an hour. This seems to disprove the old saying that “large bodies move slowly”.

I do not think anyone can show that the old-style gravitation could play any part in causing the sun to rotate; but it is splendidly adapted to be rotated by light repulsion. Its equator would be a very large rimmed wheel for the light belt to run on. The sun is not heavy in proportion to its size. It would be turned with comparative ease, considering its great size. And here the light has a chance to show what it can do.

The sun attends to the lighting and heating of the planets, and by raising the seawater into clouds to be distributed over the land it indirectly supplies the waterfalls that turn many of the wheels of industry. It may therefore well be termed the great light, heat and power institution of the solar system.

The first planet in order of distance from the sun is Mercury, whose diameter is 3,060 miles. Its orbit is about 36,000,000 miles from the sun. That orbit is, however, very eccentric, so that the planet is sometimes 15,000,000 miles nearer the sun than at other times. Its speed of revolution is about 109,360 miles per hour, while that of Earth is only 68,040 miles. It takes only 88 days for its revolution around the sun; and its period of rotation is also thought to be eightyeight days, or, in effect, it has no rotation, but keeps the same side always turned toward the sun; but it is so near that luminary that it is hard to get a look at it, and the matter of rotation is rather one of theory than of observation.

Venus is about 67,000,000 miles from the sun. Its diameter is said to be 7,826 miles, while that of the planet on which we live is 7,919, a difference of only 93 miles. Venus performs its revolution in about 225 days (of our time), and it rotates on its axis in 23 hours and 21 minutes. It has no satellite. Its orbit is almost a circle, its distance from the sun being only about 900,000 miles different at different times, in an orbit of about 234,000,000 miles. My little cyclopedia states that an article falling to its surface would traverse 13 feet in the first second, while here it drops 16 feet.

The next little planet in the order of distance from the sun is Earth, and the distance over 91,000,000 miles. Her orbit, while not so near a circle as that of Venus, is not considered very eccentric as orbits go, there being a difference in distance from the sun at different times of about 3,000,000 miles, in an orbit whose diameter is about 182,000,000.

The earth rotates in exactly 24 hours. This exactness is due to the fact that our clocks were designed to measure the day in agreement with Earth’s speed of rotation.

This twenty-four hours measures the time from the crossing of any given meridian by the sun until it crosses it again. That is called a solar day. But the time from the crossing of a given meridian by a fixed star until it crosses it again is three minutes and fifty-six seconds short of the twenty-four hours, as the stars rise over the eastern horizon that much earlier each succeeding evening; and a star will appear to circle the earth 366)4 times in a year, or while the sun appears to make 365.242 revolutions. The time taken in the 36614 crossings of the meridian by a fixed star is called a sidereal year. The solar year is the one recognized in our calendars. But there is nothing exact in astronomy, and the calendars are of 365 days for three years and then 366 for one year, and still there is a difference of a fractional part of a day.

Earth is accompanied by a moon 2,160 miles in diameter. The moon could be piled on Canada, and would not reach from Montreal to Vancouver.

The moon always turns the same side, or face, toward the earth. This is said to be due to the supposed fact that the moon is not a perfect globe, but is elongated, and somewhat pearshaped ; and the large end is turned toward us, and held so by the “attraction” of the earth. If this were true we might expect that the axis of rotation would be from the stem end to the blossom end of the pear, but we know positively that such is not the case. We can observe the markings on the moon’s surface, and could detect any rotation around a visible point of axis. No rotation whatever is seen, and no point on the moon’s visible surface could possibly be one of the ends of the axis of rotation. Select any point you like as its north, or south pole, and you will see that if the body of the moon rotated around an axis ending at that point we could observe the motion of rotation without the aid of a telescope. Some astronomer has suggested that the earth and moon act in this matter as one body, and rotate around an imaginary axis about 1200 miles within the circumference of the earth. If the two bodies were strung like beads on a long rod (240 thousand miles apart) the center of gravity, or balancing mark for the two, would be that point 1200 miles inside the earth (and always on the side toward the moon), and then the point of rotation would not be on the moon’s surface, and would not be visible to us. The fact is that the moon does not rotate, but by its revolution around the earth it turns, as related to the sun and stars, once in about twenty-eight days.

The imaginary geo-lunar axis is supposed to move always on the true oval orbit around the sun, and never departs from it to go to this side or that. Both earth and moon, as complete and separate bodies, move spirally from side to side of the true oval, but the common center keeps to the line (so it is said).

It is possible that the earth may have been blown off from the sun by an explosion, and thrown out into space some ninety millions of miles, and that while it was still a shapeless mass (“without form, and void”) it began its revolutions around the sun. The latter body is said to rotate with a speed of over 4,000 miles an hour, and any fragment thrown off would be given a movement toward the east.

And the effect of light propulsion would be to increase that movement continually; so that now we find the old earth rushing around in its orbit at a speed of 68,040 miles an hour, or about 1000 times the speed of an express train. Whether it is still increasing its speed we do not know, as there is no absolute unit of time with which it can be checked up. And how did it acquire a rotary motion? Certainly not by any magnetic attraction. A magnet draws only toward itself, and does not pull on one side more than another.

Henry Norris Russell, director of the observatory of Princeton University, says on this subject:

“They,” that is, the astronomers, “are forced to the conclusion that the distribution of rotational momentum in the system is so peculiar that the planets could not have derived the large amount which they now have at the expense of an originally rapidly rotating sun. The only available explanation of their existence appears to be the one now familiar: that the planets were ejected from the sun during huge eruptions caused by the close approach of a passing star, and set moving laterally in orbits by the attraction of this star as it receded.

“So far the methods of astronomy, aided liberally by its inseparable companion mathematics, enables us to follow the problem. But in the chaotic turmoil which must have followed the great outburst, detailed calculations become impossible, and we have to accept it simply as a fact that eight large masses and vast numbers of small ones remained in motion about the sun.”

I have read this over very carefully but fail to see in it any reason whatever why the earth, at that time, took on a rotary motion. The ejection of the earth by a rapidly rotating sun might give the earth a revolutionary motion, might start it in revolution around the sun, just as a bullet from a rifle on a rapidly moving train is given not only an outward motion, away from the train, but also a motion in the direction the train is taking. The bullet would land, not opposite the point where the gun was fired, but opposite the place where the train would be when the bullet landed. The bullet would not be caused to rotate.

You see, the earth revolves around the sun in an orbit not far from 572,000,000 miles long. The diameter of the earth is about 8,000 miles. If we make a diagram of that orbit by two lines, one representing where the outside edge travels (the edge away from the sun), and the other the course traveled by the inner edge (the one toward the sun), you will find that the outer line, or track, is about 50,000 miles longer than the inner one; so the outer edge of the earth moves 50,000 miles farther in one trip around the sun than does the inner edge. Then by mathematical necessity the outer edge must move faster than the inner one. There would be a difference of about 50,000 miles a year to start with, and the light propulsion would increase that day by day and year by year, until it reached a tremendous speed. As the part of the earth on the inside track will not be separated from the part on the outside, the increased speed takes the form of rotation. The old-style gravitation gives no reason whatever for the rotation of planets.

We do not know whether or not the sun revolves around some other great star. If it does, our astronomers have not figured out which one it is. Some claim that the solar system shows evidence that it is traveling towards Vega; but if this is true, that rules Vega out as the center around which we revolve, for a heavenly body never moves very far towards its center of revolution, but always keeps at about the same distance. So far as we know, our sun may be really a fixed star, or nearly so.

And now, about the moon. Why did it not acquire a rotary motion as the earth did? As to the old-style gravitation: if it had nothing to do in causing the earth to acquire a motion of rotation, it has equally had nothing to do in preventing the moon from doing so.

The college theory is that, the moon being pear-shaped (which they only imagine), the larger end would be attracted more by the earth than the small end would be. But a magnet is just as likely to choose the little end as the big one, and if the object attracted has a long side (as a pear has) it is more likely still to choose the side in preference to either of the ends, especially if the magnet is larger than the object attracted.

We consider the old-time theory that the moon was blown off from the earth in some violent explosion that took place many years ago. It was blown out into space some 240,000 miles. It would start its career with no rotation, but would inherit some of the earth’s eastward revolutionary motion. It would continue traveling eastward along with the earth. Its track in that journey would be about 2,160 miles wide, that being its diameter. And the outer edge of the track would be 13,570 miles longer than the inner edge. The outer side, the side more distant from the earth, must then move faster than the inner edge, and why has not rotation developed as in the case of the earth?

I used to think that the moon moved in a sort of spirals around the earth; but I now believe the moon’s track in the heavens is only slightly curved first to one side, and then to the other side of the line of the earth’s orbit. It crosses that orbit going outside of it, in receding slightly from the sun, and recrosses it coming back. It is never more than about 240,000 miles from the orbit, but the distance along the orbit from the outward crossing to the inward one is around 22,000,000 miles, so you can see that the width of one-half of the spiral around the earth is, as to its length, as 240,000 to 22,000,000. A diagram representing this, on a scale of 1,000,000 miles to the inch, would be twenty-two inches long and only one-quarter inch wide.

But even with that slight deviation from the straight line, the edge (or side), of the moon away from the earth will of necessity have to move a little faster than the edge that is toward the earth. And why doesn’t the light repulsion increase that difference in speed, and work it into a rotation? Well, it does begin to do this, but scarcely makes a start before the moon recrosses the orbit going toward the sun and before the rotation more than makes a very slight turning movement. The turning slows down at the crossing of the orbit and then a slight movement begins in the opposite direction. It is the other side of the moon now that is farthest from the orbit and is traveling on the long side of the spiral track. The rotation scarcely begins in one direction before it is stopped and started the other way. These movements are very slight and can be observed only with a telescope. But they have been observed, and are known in astronomical parlance as the ‘libration of the moon”.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, treating this subject, remarks: “The different points of the lunar globe must appear to turn about her centre, sometimes in one direction, and sometimes in the contrary, and the same appearance be produced as would result from a small oscillation of the moon.” That is just what takes place, a small oscillation, and not a rotation.

The Encyclopaedia continues: “The spots near the eastern or western edge of her disk disappear according as her motion in her orbit is more or less rapid than her mean motion.” So it seems there is a slight tendency to rotate, the part away from the earth moving a little faster than the part toward the earth, but the change of the moon from one side to the other of the terrestrial orbit about every fourteen days reverses the motion, so that it never amounts to more than a very small part of a complete rotation, a part so small that it was not noticed until the telescope was invented.

Can anyone tell me how attraction can cause a globe to rotate? If a steel ball is hung near a magnet it will be drawn towards the magnet, but it won’t rotate. Why should it? There is no reason why there should be a pull on one side more than on the other, and if it pulls on both sides alike why should one side turn towTard it rather than the other? If a magnet would cause rotation, that would establish perpetual motion and the magnet would become a favorite unit of power plants. We would have no need of dams and canals in the St. Lawrence, but could arrange to have magnets turn all our wheels, and create a busy hum for twenty-four hours a day, and at no cost at all.

The light propulsion theory does furnish a reason why planets revolve and rotate; but gravitation does not!

I find that many are satisfied with the old theory of gravitation because the power controlling some of the heavenly bodies can be shown to operate on the principle of proportion inverse to the square of the distance, as per Newton’s formula: the greater the distance, the less the power.

Undoubtedly a power to which the name "gravitation” has been given does operate on that rule, the power diminishing in proportion to the square of the distance between the two bodies, but it takes some fine figuring to show why it should do so. It is easy to demonstrate that light distributes itself in quantity according to that rule.

If light is sent through a one-foot-square opening one foot away from its source it illuminates that one-foot space. Two feet from the light it will illuminate a square whose sides are each two feet. The distance from the light is two feet, the square of which is four feet, and the space illuminated is four square feet. Put a screen four feet away from the light that is shining through the one-foot opening and the space illuminated will be 16 square feet (or the square of the distance of four feet). The light coming through the one-foot opening is spread over a space measuring 16 square feet, and the light per square foot is only 1/16 as strong as that coming through the one-foot opening.

Well, now we’ll leave the earth, for a time, a very interesting, but unimportant little ball of mud: interesting to those who have to live and pay taxes there, but of little account to the inhabitants of other planets.

All aboard! The next stop is Mars!

Mars is a planet with a diameter of about 4,400 miles, and it moves in an orbit averaging about 139,000,000 miles from the sun. Its orbit is quite eccentric, so that at one time it is 26,000,000 miles nearer than at others.

Seen through a telescope Mars (as well as most of the planets) has phases of light and darkness the same as the moon, but it is never all dark. Its orbit never takes it between the earth and the sun, and so the sunlight is always striking it on a part of the side that is turned toward the earth.

More has been written about Mars than about any other planet, but much of it is mere fiction and wild imagination; some is in the line of speculation as to the conditions on that planet, whether it has a population of intelligent creatures, like the people of earth, what the weather and temperature may be, and all such matters.

Most of the conditions imagined are badly affected by the false theory of gravitation, and some of them are remarkable for their absurdity. We are told that the people who live there are very much larger than we are here, a height of twenty feet being only ordinary. Gravitation is said to be so much less on that small planet that what would be a ton of coal here would weigh on Mars only ten or twelve pounds. Everything is of light weight there, and a man of Mars can manage with a body of giant size as easily as a bantam weight here can manipulate his diminutive fists and feet. The giant Martians can take up and carry masses of material that could scarcely be handled here by a steam shovel. The well known “canals” of Mars may have been dug by the Martians without any mechanical aids beyond enormous picks and shovels.

Queer, isn’t it, that the Creator made the little planets fit only for very large inhabitants, and the large planets for mere midgets ? If that sort of theory can be shown to be true, I would certainly be more inclined to give evolution the credit for creation than I have been.

Now the light propulsion theory is much more simple, if perhaps not so scientific. By it, small objects on the outside of a planet are supposed to be pushed toward it by the force of light, not pulled towards it by that 'unseen spirit which inhabits every particle and pulls on every other one’. Light probably strikes Mars with about the same force as it does the earth. Starlight, anyway, will be the same there as here. Sunlight is spread out more there, and may he somewhat fainter. Starlight has come a great distance and may have slowed down a bit on the way, and if so, would really have more gravitational force than the light of the sun just starting out at great speed.

Lately I have seen in a newspaper an article showing that Mars is losing the nitrogen from its air because its atoms are so very light in weight that the planet does not hold them, and they drop off into space and are forever lost to Mars. So if that planet is habitable now, it won’t be for long, if that writer is reliable. Creatures like men cannot get along without air and water.

But telescopes show white caps at the north and south poles of Mars, and these caps appear to melt and disappear when the summer season arrives. And if there is snow on Mars there must be some water.

If there are people on Mars, no doubt they are differentiated as here: carpenters, farmers, lawyers, doctors, loafers and workers. And their astronomers look up at the great planet Earth, ten times as imposing to look at as Mars is to us, and they tell their people ‘it’s a great pity Earth is so big; why the air there would be heavy enough to crush a man. Think of the people of Earth existing in a pressure of fifteen or sixteen pounds to the square inch, a load of two or three tons for each person! No, there’s no life on Earth; that’s sure. And besides they are so near the sun that the temperature there must be something awful. People might live near the poles in winter, but in summer they would have to burrow in the ground, and only come up at night to dig a few potatoes and carrots and hurry back with them to the cool shades underground. These summer resorts would be very expensive. Then there are ominous-looking black clouds floating about in Earth’s air, something that is never seen in Mars. Evidently the terrible heat of the sun draws up the water of the oceans, and accumulates it in clouds until they have enough to flood the country underneath. Then the clouds burst, and there is a new deluge to record. The people underground have to batten their hatches and wait until they can see by their periscopes that the water has subsided. It’s an awful place, and we can be glad we’re living where we are’.

Although Mars is a lot smaller than the earth, it has two moons to our one.

One of these moons is quite near to the planet, only about 3,700 miles away, and it flies around the parent body with great velocity, so much so that it completes its revolution in about one-third of the time it takes Mars to rotate. This satellite is seen twice in the Martian heavens in one night. And that lends good support to the light repulsion theory. Anything high above a planet, and disconnected from it, is likely to move faster than the planet itself. The air around the earth, high above it, is always moving eastward a little faster than the solid globe. A balloon sent up six miles will always float away to the east. A monkey-wrench or hammer dropped down the shaft of a deep mine will always fall east of the perpendicular line.

But so far as we know, times may be just as hard on Mars as here; so we may as well move on now toward Jupiter.

There are some hundreds of little planets called “asteroids” between Mars and Jupiter. Gravitation does not draw them together and make of them one fair-sized planet. Probably they reflect enough light to keep themselves apart They must reflect light or we could not see them. Our moon reflects so much that it almost looks as though every particle on its surface constituted itself a mirror. And the earth reflects very much more. The light from the moon pushes the earth away, and the light from the earth pushes the moon away, to a certain distance; but as it gets farther out the reflected light spreads out and becomes faint (according to inverse square of the distance), and the starlight pushing in becomes more powerful than the reduced reflected light pushing out. The reflected sunlight pushing on the moon, together with the starlight also pushing in the same direction and coming from a whole hemisphere of the sky except the small patch covered by the earth, is sufficient to keep the moon out to its proper distance. If that reflected light were weaker, the moon would come a little nearer; if stronger, it would be pushed out a little.

Sunlight can push a gaseous body out much farther than it can send a solid one of the same weight. It pushes on only one side of a planet, and the gaseous ones present a much larger surface in proportion to weight to be pushed. The starlight strikes from all sides, and an augmentation of size affects one side as much as another.

Every motion of the heavenly bodies, large or small, is regulated automatically. If one star gets too near to another the light push sends them apart. There are many millions of stars in the sky, and no one has seen two of them collide. I would fear to change the working of the universe to the gravitation theory. If by any chance one of the stars approached another beyond the line of safety, the gravitation law would cause their attraction to increase; they would approach nearer and nearer and be attracted more and more, and finally would collide with disastrous results.

The idea that a little extra attraction would cause one (or both) of the attracted bodies to move faster, and the extra speed would send one of them off on a tangent until it got to a place where it would not disturb the balance of the universe, is all bunk! Try it with a magnet. It will draw the escaping articles to itself; and so would a star if it were really a magnet.

Jupiter is the largest of the planets; 2y2 times as large as all the other planets together. Its mass is three hundred times that of the earth. Its distance from the sun is about 475,692,000 miles. Its year is longer than eleven of ours. Jupiter’s diameter is 85,000 miles. The density is only about one-quarter of Earth’s. It has four moons. Its surface seems to be unstable, like moving clouds, always moving east, and it is thought that Jupiter not long ago was a burning globe and that it is not yet cooled off and solidified. Probably all of the planets were once ablaze; that is, if they were in the beginning blown off from the sun, and Jupiter and some of the others have not yet cooled.

Imagination, born of the gravitation theory, would make everything on Jupiter weigh much more than on the earth. And reversing the theory that little Mars may have gigantic inhabitants, we may expect those of Jupiter to be very small, about six inches high, but very strongly built to withstand the great air pressure and the terrible gravitation pull, perhaps having six or eight legs, like ants, to distribute the strain. But then again, by the time Jupiter has cooled off enough to make it fit for inhabitants things may have changed and the light pressure may be installed there so that gravitation will be the same as here and on the other planets.

The next planet is Saturn, the one with the wonderful rings, which so surprised Galileo when he first tried his telescope on them.

Saturn moves in an orbit about 872,000,000 miles from the sun. The orbit is quite eccentric, and the period of revolution over twenty-nine years. Saturn is the second largest planet in the solar system; diameter, 70,000 miles.

Saturn is much flattened at the poles. It rotates in about 10^ hours, and the rings take only a few minutes more.

It seems strange that the larger planets rotate in less time than the smaller ones: Jupiter in nine hours and fifty-five minutes, and Saturn in ten hours and thirty minutes, while Venus, Earth and Mars rotate in twenty-four hours, or a little less.

Gravitation does not seem to connect itself at all with the rotation of the planets, so of course it cannot tell us why the larger ones turn so very much faster than the small ones. Light repulsion (or propulsion) appears to fit right in with the facts. The greater the equator, the longer will be the rim of the wheel for the light belt to run on, and, no matter how great a speed has been attained by the planet in its rotation, it can never come anywhere near to the 186,000 miles a second of the light belt, and so is continually urged to whirl faster, and yet faster.

I have been unable to get any figures for the size of Saturn’s rings, but from a picture of that planet in an astronomical work I measure the rings as 166,250 miles in diameter. As the rings and the planet turn in very nearly the same time (lO1/^ hours), it follows that the planet’s surface rotates one mile in about 1/6 of a second, and the outer edge of the outer ring turns one mile in 1/13 of a second. What there is in gravitation to make that outer ring fly at a speed a little more than twice that of the planet itself I do not know. Where is the magnet that gives the power? By the accepted theory the greater the distance of the attracting body, the less is the attraction.

If the sun is the magnet, why does it not make Venus and the earth rotate faster, as they are much nearer? Earth rotates about one mile in four seconds, and Venus about the same; Saturn one mile in about 1/6 of a second, and her rings one mile in less than 1/13.

Now the light belt that really turns these great wheels has a speed of 186,000 miles per second, and it might continue to push the planets until a much greater speed than the present is attained.

The light belt pulls much harder on the rings than on the planet itself, because they are moving much faster than the planet and are therefore nearer to the speed of light, and so they give it more hold, or clutch, on the surface.

Next to Saturn comes Uranus, a planet with a diameter of about 33,000 miles (25,000 miles greater than the diameter of the earth).

Its orbit is some 1,750,000,000 miles from the sun, and its year is as long as eighty-four of ours. It is thought to turn on its axis in about nine and one-half hours; another planet very far from the motor but doing great stunts in the line of speed!

It has four satellites, and they revolve around Uranus, not as our moon does, but from east to west.

Neptune, until very recently supposed to be the most distant of the planets, is away out beyond Uranus, probably 2,745,000,000 miles from the sun. It is supposed to have one satellite. Both Neptune and Uranus are thought to emit light themselves instead of reflecting that of the sun. If so, they are still blazing as when thrown off from the sun, if they were ever thrown off.

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