Flowers of the Sky. Richard Anthony Proctor
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But even this is not all. Among the waves which reach the eye many, nay, most, are so small that ordinary vision cannot perceive their action. Take, however, a telescope, and so gather them together as to intensify this action, and they are rendered perceptible, just as the unnoticed heaving of ocean becomes a manifest wave-motion when it reaches a regularly narrowing inlet. Thus, from stars so remote that their light has required thousands, or, even in some cases, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of years in reaching us, the light-waves flow steadily in upon us. So small are these waves, that the breadth of from forty to sixty thousand of them would occupy but a single inch. Through every point in space waves from all the hundred millions of stars are at all times simultaneously rushing at the rate of one hundred and eighty-five thousand miles in every second of time: yet they travel on altogether undisturbed, and each tells its story as distinctly as though the ether had conveyed no other message, and that message but for a short distance.
It would be difficult to say which thought, considered in its real significance, is more striking—the thought of what is done for us by light regarded as a terrestrial phenomenon, or the thought of what light is doing, and has done, in presenting to us a view of the starlit heavens.
When the sun rises in splendour above the eastern horizon, tinting the sky with varied colours, lighting up the clouds which till then have been but dark patches on the heavens, bringing out the colours of hill and dale, rock and river, fields and woods, the heart gladdens at the spectacle. A pleasing melancholy falls on us as the light fades away at eventide, tint after tint vanishing, until at length the gloom of night enshrouds all. The full splendour of mid-day, the chastened splendour of a moonlit night, and the glory of the heavens when "all the stars shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart," stir the soul in like manner; and it might seem to many that to analyse these glories, to explain their scientific meaning, would be to rob the mind of the pleasure it had before found in such scenes. Many would be disposed to think that a purer enjoyment is expressed by Augustine than any student of science could find in the wonders of light, in those words in which he expresses [7]
[8]
[9]his sense of the loveliness of fair forms and brilliant colours. "For light, queen of the colours," he says, "bathing all I can look upon, from morning till evening, let me go where I will, will still keep gliding by me in unnumbered guises, and soothe me whilst I am busy at other things, and am thinking nothing of her." But the sensuous pleasure afforded by light is enhanced, while a purer and higher enjoyment is superadded, when the real meaning of the display is understood. As the astronomer sees in the sun a more glorious object than the sun of the poet, recognising in imagination not only the visible splendour of that orb, but the mighty energy with which it is swaying the motions of a scheme of circling worlds, the wondrous activities at work throughout its entire frame, the inconceivable tumult which must prevail in that seemingly silent globe, so the glories of light, rightly understood, are far more impressive than as they appeal simply to the senses.
Fig. 1.—Sunrise on the Righi.
Consider, for instance, the real meaning of sunrise. The orb seemingly rising above the horizon, but, in reality, at rest, is the source of all the glory which is spreading over the fair face of earth. The atoms of that remote body, vibrating with intensest activity, send forth in all directions ethereal waves, and of these relatively but a very few, about one in two thousand millions, fall upon our earth, producing the phenomena of sunlight. They have been little more than eight minutes on the road, but in that short time they have traversed more than 90,000,000 of miles. Were they to fall directly upon our earth, we should see few of the splendours which attend the uprising of the sun. The deep air clothing our earth receives the onward rushing waves, and reflects them in all directions. To use Biot's simile, "The air is a sort of brilliant veil, which multiplies and diversifies the sunlight by an infinity of repercussions." Nor is the wonder of the scene, or its effect in filling the mind with solemn and poetic thoughts, diminished—on the contrary, it is enhanced—by the recollection that the gradually growing glory of day is brought about by the slow turning of the mighty earth—
"that spinning sleeps
On her soft axle, as she paces even,
And bears us soft with the smooth air along."
But if this is true of a scene of terrestrial splendour, how much more fully may it be said of the glories of the heavens? No poet, if unaware of the real meaning of modern discoveries respecting the celestial bodies, can be moved by the starlit depths as the astronomer is, at least the astronomer whose study of science is not limited to mere observation and calculation. Hundreds of bright points of light sparkling, and sometimes varying strangely in colour, form, no doubt, a beautiful scene; but the scene is not less beautiful, and certainly it is far more impressive, when we remember that every one of these points of light is a sun, mighty in attractive energy like ours, its whole surface glowing with fiery heat, and every particle of its substance constantly in motion, if not always in the fierce rush of cosmic hurricanes, yet with the ceaseless vibrations which generate the ethereal light-waves telling us of the star's existence.
There is one strange thought connected with the motion of light-waves through the ether of space which has not, I think, received the attention it deserves.
Every one knows that when we look at the heavens we do not see the celestial bodies where they are, but where they were, and again, not where they were at any one moment of time, but some where they were a short time ago, others where they were very long ago. But it is not so generally known, or remembered by those who do know it, that if light were not so active as it is the result would be that utterly incorrect pictures of the celestial depths would continually be presented to us. As matters actually are no orb in space can appear very far from its true place. We see the sun, for instance, at any moment, not where he is, but where he was (or rather towards the direction in which he lay) about eight minutes before. But as the real velocity of the earth, and therefore the apparent velocity of the sun, amounts only to about eighteen miles per second, the sun is only thrown about 9000 miles out of his true position, which is but about the ninetieth part of his diameter: so that we see the sun very nearly in his right place. Now it might seem that a star whose light takes, say, twenty years in reaching us, must be seen very far from its true place, supposing the star to be travelling along very quickly; and, in one sense, this is true. If such a star is moving at the rate of fifty miles per second, athwart the line of sight, it will be out of place by so considerable a distance as 315,000,000,000 of miles. Yet the star will appear very nearly in its true position, simply because, at the star's enormous distance from us, even the great distance just named is reduced to a very small apparent amount. Such a star would, in fact, be displaced by only about the thirtieth part of the sun's or moon's apparent diameters, or by about a fifteenth part of the distance separating the middle star of the Great Bear's tail from its small companion, sometimes called Jack by the Middle Horse. Thus the stellar heavens present very truly to us the positions of the stars; for such athwart motion as I have just imagined would be very much larger than the motion of far the greater number of the stars. But we only thus see the heavens truly pictured because of the enormous velocity with which light travels. If light swept along only at the rate of a hundred miles in a [13] [14] [15]second (a velocity still far beyond our powers of conception), there would be no believing what we should see, for every star, and our own sun, and all the planets, and even our own companion planet, the moon, would be thrown in appearance very far from their true positions. If they were all shifted in position by the same amount and in the same direction the picture would still be true, in a sense, just as we see a true picture of an object at the bottom of a clear lake, though the picture is displaced by the refractive action of the water on the rays of light. But, in the imagined case, the sun, and moon, and planets, and stars would be shifted by different amounts and in different ways, simply because they are moving at different rates and in different directions. The scene presented to us would have been utterly untrue. Astronomy as a science could probably have had no existence in such a case. Assuredly it could have had no existence until students of the heavenly bodies had learned to accept as the first axiom of their science the doctrine that "Seeing is not believing."