COSMOGONY — JEANS 173 



There is a certain amount of direct evidence of this chance of 

 mass. The radiation of the stars imposes an endlessly recurring 

 capital levy upon their masses, which, as observation shows, is 

 graduated and increases very steeply indeed for the richest stars. 

 The levy makes all the stars poorer, but it also tends to equalize what 

 wealth remains; the older the starg get, the more nearly equal their 

 impoverished masses become. This is a large part of the reason 

 why the stars are nearly equal in mass. The process is most clearly 

 marked in the binary systems, which have been formed by a single 

 star breaking into two. The two component stars of such a sj'stem 

 are necessarily of the same age, and it is a matter of observation 

 that the small stars of old systems are nearer to equality of mass 

 than the massive stars of young systems. 



Thus observation and theory agree in indicating that the univer?<e 

 is melting away into radiation. Our position is that of polar bears 

 on an iceberg that uas broken loose from the ice pack surrounding 

 the pole, and is inexorably melting away as the iceberg drifts to 

 warmer latitudes and ultimate extinction. 



Five million million years ago the sun had stored up within itself 

 the energy which was destined to provide its light and heat until to- 

 day, and the mass of this energy was many times the present mass of 

 the sun. No means is known by which so much mass could be 

 stored except in the form of electrons and protons. Thus we must 

 suppose that the radiation of the sun through these millions of 

 millions of years has been produced by the annihilation of electrons 

 and protons which existed in it originally, but no longer exist now. 

 These electrons and protons are pure bottled energy; the continu- 

 ous breakage of these bottles in the sun sets free the radiation 

 which warms and lights our earth, and enough unbroken bottles 

 remain to provide light and heat for millions of millions of years 

 to come. 



The amount of energy made aA^ailable in this way is amazing. 

 The annihilation of a pound of coal a week would produce as much 

 energy as the combustion of the 5,000,000 tons a week which are 

 mined in the British Isles; an ounce of coal a month would provide 

 locomotive power for all the British railways, while a single drop 

 of oil would take the Mauretania across the Atlantic. When we 

 speak of the efficiency of a steam engine as 5 per cent or so, we 

 regard complete use of the thermal energy of combustion as 100 

 per cent efficiency. If we measure the work done against the total 

 intrinsic energy of the fuel as made available by its complete anni- 

 hilation, the efficiency is more like 0.00000001 per cent. On this 

 scale the efficiency of the sun and stars is exactly 100 per cent. 



