A UNIVERSE OF PERMANENT REGIME 21 



if the surface composition of the rocks is maintained 

 uniformly throughout the core. Unless this is not 

 the case, or unless the energy they evolve is being 

 utilised in unknown ways, the conclusion follows 

 that the interior of the globe must be getting hotter 

 instead of colder. The uncomfortable prediction of 

 the ultimate destruction of the world by fire, is now 

 at least as probable as the former fate pictured by 

 science, that the world must be steadily cooling, 

 and that it was only a matter of time before it 

 became lifeless and dead. 



The clock wound up in the beginning to run for 

 a certain time, a universe provided at its creation with 

 a certain store of available energy to dissipate and 

 live by at an ever decreasing rate, until it arrived 

 ultimately and inevitably at complete physical stagna- 

 tion and death, is being displaced by a less arbitrary 

 view as science advances and invades more and more 

 the vast territory still beyond its ken. It is at 

 least legitimate to conceive a universe of permanent 

 regime, carrying in its smallest ultimate particles 

 the seeds of its own regeneration. But the linking 

 of the ends of the process together into such a 

 closed cycle still involves the assumption of events 

 that remain unknown and a reversal of the known 

 continuous direction of energy transformations. 

 Such a reversal may well occur under conditions 

 still, and possibly for ever, beyond the power of 

 experiment to reproduce in the laboratory. 



The dream of the alchemist, the transmutation 

 of the elements, so far from being a chimerical idea, 

 or a process to be sought for possibly in the trans- 

 cendental chemistry of glowing suns, is in con- 

 tinuous natural operation on the earth amongst the 

 most complex sorts of atoms known to the chemist. 

 All heavy elements, presumably, if they could be 

 transmuted artificially into lighter ones, would evolve 



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