i8 



evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



in time and space. Milne's mathematics applied in detail in- 

 dicate that electron revolution was slower a long time ago; 

 that is, the planetary electron in the hydrogen atom, for 

 instance, takes less time to revolve now than formerly. By 

 reasoning through the Bohr theory of atomic spectra, Milne 

 concluded that the light emitted by atoms in the galaxies in 

 the far distant past was of longer wavelength than that 

 emitted here on earth at present. It is thus that he explains 

 the shift toward the red in the light of galaxies which are 

 millions of light-years distant. 



Sir Arthur Eddington thought that the universe is forever 

 expanding and will eventually be dispersed so remotely as 

 to cease to be an entity. It was Eddington who applied the 

 second law of thermodynamics (entropy) to this situation 

 and came to the conclusion that all the energy of the uni- 

 verse is being dissipated, and that some day there would 

 exist only a vast, cold deadness (heat death). Few, if any, 

 cosmologists have ever liked this prediction, but it is some- 

 what difficult to explain away. Escape from the heat-death 

 concept lies in the direction of Einstein's equations of the 

 equivalence of mass and energy. It is unreasonable to sup- 

 pose that this equivalence will not eventually be found to 

 work both ways in the universe. Perhaps the key to this 

 reciprocal convertibility of matter and energy is at hand in 

 some of the recent investigations concerning the role of 

 "mesons" in the subatomic microcosm. These energy en- 

 tities come into existence for only a ten-thousandth of a 

 second and are continually being born and reborn. They 

 explode with bursts of energy that are thousands of times 

 greater than those which come from the disintegration of 

 atoms. Robert Oppenheimer thinks that possibly the mesons 

 manifest the "pulse beat" that is necessary to hold the uni- 

 verse together. Perhaps they are a binding connection be- 

 tw'een the underlying field energy of the unmanifest cosmos 

 and the reality of the manifest mass-energy continuum, a 

 part of the creative force in the universe. 



