MIRACLES OF SCIENCE 



scope, are thousands of light-years away. Meantime 

 light comes to us from the sun in eight minutes, and 

 travels on to Neptune, the farthest member of the 

 solar system, in five and a half hours. 



Such estimates serve to give us at least a vague no- 

 tion of stellar distances, and of our isolation in space. 

 But most of all they make us wonder at the wizardry 

 that has enabled the modern star-gazer to ferret out 

 the secrets of bodies so unthinkably distant. It would 

 almost appear as if the modern instruments had made 

 'distance a negligible quantity. And in point of fact 

 it is true that the universe at large is the laboratory 

 of the scientific investigator of our day. 



Not content with analyzing terrestrial phenom- 

 ena, he reaches out to the sun, to the farthest planets, 

 then on across the abysmal spaces to the stars and 

 nebulae. And he tests the physical properties and 

 chemical composition of those infinitely distant 

 bodies in a way that is weird and mystifying. He 

 not only expands the limits of the visible universe 

 to unbelievable dimensions, but he invades the do- 

 main of the invisible. He proves to us that there are 

 myriads of dark stars out in space, and that in many 

 cases these stars can be located, tested as to their 

 flight, and actually weighed and measured. 



Weirdly incomprehensible as these feats seem to 

 the uninitiated, and assuredly they do have attri- 

 butes of the miraculous, there is nothing occult or 

 inexplicable about them. They are performed with 

 instruments of definite and well-known types ; instru- 

 ments that differ from those in common use among 

 scientific workers in general only in the exquisite 



