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Gore John Ellard
Astronomical Curiosities: Facts and Fallacies

“A more hopeless problem than this could not be presented to the ordinary human intellect. There are tens of thousands of men who could be successful in all the ordinary walks of life, hundreds who could wield empires, thousands who could gain wealth, for one who could take up this astronomical problem with any hope of success. The men who have done it are, therefore, in intellect the select few of the human race – an aristocracy ranking above all others in the scale of being. The astronomical ephemeris is the last outcome of their productive genius.”

In a paper on the “Aspects of American Astronomy,” Prof. Newcomb says, “A great telescope is of no use without a man at the end of it, and what the telescope may do depends more upon this appendage than upon the instrument itself. The place which telescopes and observatories have taken in astronomical history are by no means proportional to their dimensions. Many a great instrument has been a mere toy in the hands of its owner. Many a small one has become famous. Twenty years ago there was here in your city [Chicago] a modest little instrument which, judged by its size, could not hold up its head with the great ones even of that day. It was the private property of a young man holding no scientific position and scarcely known to the public. And yet that little telescope is to-day among the famous ones of the world, having made memorable advances in the astronomy of double stars, and shown its owner to be a worthy successor of the Herschels and Struves in that line of work.”⁵¹¹ Here Prof. Newcomb evidently refers to Prof. Burnham, and the 6-inch telescope with which he made many of his remarkable discoveries of double stars. With reference to Burnham’s work, Prof. Barnard says —

“It represents the labour of a struggling amateur, who during the day led the drudging life of a stenographer in the United States court in Chicago, and at night worked among the stars for the pure love of it. Such work deserves an everlasting fame, and surely this has fallen to Mr. Burnham.”

Admiral Smyth says —

“A man may prove a good astronomer without possessing a spacious observatory: thus Kepler was wont to observe on the bridge at Prague; Schröter studied the moon, and Harding found a planet from a gloriette; while Olbers discovered two new planets from an attic of his house.”⁵¹²

It is probably not generally known that “some of the greatest astronomers of modern times, such as Kepler, Newton, Hansen, Laplace, and Leverrier, scarcely ever looked through a telescope.”⁵¹³

Kepler, who always signed himself Keppler in German, is usually supposed to have been born on December 21, 1571, in the imperial town of Weil, but according to Baron von Breitschwert,⁵¹⁴ he was really born on December 27, 1571, in the village of Magstadt in Wurtemberg.

According to Lieut. Winterhalter, M. Perrotin of the Nice Observatory declared “that two hours’ work with a large instrument is as fatiguing as eight with a small one, the labour involved increasing in proportion to the cube of the aperture, the chances of seeing decreasing in the same ratio, while it can hardly be said that the advantages increase in like proportion.”⁵¹⁵

The late Mr. Proctor has well said —

“It is well to remember that the hatred which many entertain against the doctrine of development as applied to solar systems and stellar galaxies is not in reality a sign, as they imagine, of humility, but is an effort to avoid the recognition of the nothingness of man in the presence of the infinities of space and time and vitality presented within the universe of God.”⁵¹⁶

Humboldt says —

“That arrogant spirit of incredulity, which rejects facts without attempting to investigate them, is in some cases almost more injurious than an unquestioning credulity. Both are alike detrimental to the force of investigations.”⁵¹⁷

With reference to the precession of the equinoxes and the changes it produces in the position of the Pole Star, it is stated in a recent book on science that the entrance passage of the Great Pyramid of Ghizeh is inclined at an angle of 30° to the horizon, and therefore points to the celestial pole. But this is quite incorrect. The Great Pyramid, it is true, is situated close to the latitude of 30°. But the entrance passage does not point exactly to the pole. The inclination was measured by Col. Vyse, and found to be 26° 45′. For six out of the nine pyramids of Ghizeh, Col. Vyse found an average inclination of 26° 47′, these inclinations ranging from 25° 55′ (2nd, or pyramid of Mycerinus) to 28° 0′ (9th pyramid).⁵¹⁸ Sir John Herschel gives 3970 B.C. as the probable date of the erection of the Great Pyramid.[520] At that time the distance of α Draconis (the Pole Star of that day) from the pole was 3° 44′ 25″, so that when on the meridian below the pole (its lower culmination as it is termed) its altitude was 30° – 3° 44′ 25″ = 26° 15′ 35″, which agrees fairly well with the inclination of the entrance passage. Letronne found a date of 3430 B.C.; but the earlier date agrees better with the evidence derived from Egyptology.

Emerson says —

 
“I am brother to him who squared the pyramids
By the same stars I watch.”
 

From February 6 to 15, 1908, all the bright planets were visible together at the same time. Mercury was visible above the western horizon after sunset, Venus very brilliant with Saturn a little above it, Mars higher still, all ranged along the ecliptic, and lastly Jupiter rising in the east.⁵¹⁹ This simultaneous visibility of all the bright planets is rather a rare occurrence.

With reference to the great improbability of Laplace’s original Nebular Hypothesis being true, Dr. See says, “We may calculate from the preponderance of small bodies actually found in the solar system – eight principal planets, twenty-five satellites (besides our moon), and 625 asteroids – that the chances of a nebula devoid of hydrostatic pressure producing small bodies is about 2658 to 1, or a decillion decillion (1066)6 to the sixth power, to unity. This figure is so very large that we shall content ourselves with illustrating a decillion decillion, and for this purpose we avail ourselves of a method employed by Archimedes to illustrate his system of enumeration. Imagine sand so fine that 10,000 grains will be contained in the space occupied by a poppy seed, itself about the size of a pin’s head; and then conceive a sphere described about our sun with a radius of 200,000 astronomical units⁵²⁰ (α Centauri being at a distance of 275,000) entirely filled with this fine sand. The number of grains of sand in this sphere of the fixed stars would be a decillion decillion⁵²¹ (1066)6. All these grains of sand against one is the probability that a nebula devoid of hydrostatical pressure, such as that which formed the planets and satellites, will lead to the genesis of such small bodies revolving about a greatly predominant central mass.”⁵²² In other words, it is practically certain that the solar system was not formed from a gaseous nebula in the manner originally proposed by Laplace. On the other hand, the evolution of the solar system from a rotating spiral nebula seems very probable.

Some one has said that “the world knows nothing of its greatest men.” The name of Mr. George W. Hill will probably be unknown to many of my readers. But the late Prof. Simon Newcomb said of him that he “will easily rank as the greatest master of mathematical astronomy during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.”⁵²³ Of Prof. Newcomb himself – also a great master in the same subject – Sir Robert Ball says he was “the most conspicuous figure among the brilliant band of contemporary American astronomers.”⁵²⁴

An astronomer is supposed to say, with reference to unwelcome visitors to his observatory, “Who steals my purse steals trash; but he that filches from me my clear nights, robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.”⁵²⁵

Cicero said, “In the heavens there is nothing fortuitous, unadvised, inconstant, or variable; all there is order, truth, reason, and constancy”; and he adds, “The creation is as plain a signal of the being of a God, as a globe, a clock, or other artificial machine, is of a man.”⁵²⁶

“Of all the epigrams attributed rightly or wrongly to Plato, the most famous has been expanded by Shelley into the four glorious lines —

 
“‘Thou wert the morning star among the living
Ere thy pure light had fled,
Now having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
New splendour to the dead.’”⁵²⁷
 

Sir David Brewster has well said,⁵²⁸ “Isaiah furnishes us with a striking passage, in which the occupants of the earth and the heavens are separately described, ‘I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even My hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded’ (Isaiah xlv. 12). But in addition to these obvious references to life and things pertaining to life, we find in Isaiah the following remarkable passage: ‘For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God Himself that formed the earth and made it; He hath established it, He created it not IN VAIN, He formed it to be inhabited’ (Isaiah xlv. 18). Here we have a distinct declaration from the inspired prophet that the earth would have been created IN VAIN if it had not been formed to be inhabited; and hence we draw the conclusion that as the Creator cannot be supposed to have made the worlds of our system and those in the sidereal system in vain, they must have been formed to be inhabited.” This seems to the present writer to be a good and sufficient reply to Dr. Wallace’s theory that our earth is the only inhabited world in the Universe!⁵²⁹ Such a theory seems incredible.

The recent discovery made by Prof. Kapteyn, and confirmed by Mr. Eddington, of two drifts of stars, indicating the existence of two universes, seems to render untenable Dr. Wallace’s hypothesis of the earth’s central position in a single universe.[531]

Note added in the Press

While these pages were in the Press, it was announced, by Dr. Max Wolf of Heidelberg, that he found Halley’s comet on a photograph taken on the early morning of September 12, 1909. The discovery has been confirmed at Greenwich Observatory. The comet was close to the position predicted by the calculations of Messrs. Cowell and Crommelin of Greenwich Observatory (Nature, September 16, 1908).

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