220 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



multi-millenially deferred deliverance? The incessant 

 ebullition going on in the plastic body of the sun pro- 

 claims, not a storing-up of heat but its steady escape and 

 dissipation. How, in the name of sanity, can a tide, how- 

 ever powerful, be postulated as liberating gases already 

 freely escaping of themselves? 



It is possible that, in deference to the recent philo- 

 sophical revulsion against the thermodynamic doctrine of 

 the impermanency of nature, Doctor Chamberlin may im- 

 agine his ancestral sun as having entered upon a decline 

 whence it was rescued and resuscitated by this tidal 

 elixir. In that case, one might suppose the sun to have 

 acquired a solid crust, of uncertain thickness, capable of 

 penning up the gathering tempests within. The query 

 then arises as to just how thick that crust should have 

 been in order to meet the requirements of the situation. 



One way to dispose of this query would be to point 

 out that the very existence of such a crust, thick or thin, 

 being, by premiss, the result of cooling off, precludes the 

 hypothesizing of any such rampant interior forces at all, 

 and that, once begun, the cooling process would neces- 

 sarily continue progressively to a state of total frigidity 

 and inaction. To assert that such a decadent sun 

 harbored a thermal reserve equal to 45,000 years' solar 

 radiation, yet allowed its exterior to chill into an im- 

 prisoning shell, is a contradiction in terms. Further- 

 more, the stauncher the shell the stronger the tide re- 

 quired to breach it, supposing such an event to have 

 really occurred ; and this, as we shall see, raises up new 

 difficulties. 



Whether through inability or negligently, Doctor 

 Chamberlin discreetly refrains from citing a single con- 

 crete illustration of what relation, if any, between the 

 star's mass and its solar distance would have sufficed to 

 meet the demands of his problem; subtly leaving upon 

 the mind of the uncritical reader the impression that 

 the possible choice of combinations of these two factors 

 is practically unlimited. Let us look into this matter 

 closely : 



