THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS 49 



Of late, however, it has begun to dawn upon scien- 

 tists that their theories involve the ultimate destruction 

 of the universe by the dissipation of all heat, when the 

 last impact shall have sounded and all the worlds shall 

 finally have been gathered into a single inert mass. In 

 this chapter I shall endeavor to disprove this dismal 

 forecast. 



In order to convey to the reader, in as concrete and 

 graphic a form as possible, the current scientific notion 

 of how the earth's internal heat came about, as well 

 as the heat of the sun and the major planets, let us go 

 back a bit, and instead of the spoonful of substance 

 I spoke of let us fancy it transformed into, say, four 

 hundred flakes. In newly apportioning these I sup- 

 pose it will be about right if we allot ten such flakes to 

 each imaginary vacuous space equivalent in cubical con- 

 tents to an average Philadelphia dwelling-house. 



It is a pet idea of modern science that the farther 

 apart bodies are the greater their "energy of position", 

 so let us meet her views, as nearly as we know how, by 

 imagining the nebular field divided into cubical cham- 

 bers thirty feet each way, and allot to each chamber 

 ten such flakes, all we have in store. Now although 

 Laplace assumed these flakes (of course he did not use 

 this particular illustration) to be incandescent, modern 

 science magnanimously admits they could not have been 

 so, exposed as they were to the absolute zero of space. 

 But, says science instead, these flakes immediately be- 

 gan to attract each other and to cause their mutual 

 collision with such force as not only to keep themselves 

 and their neighbors warm, but to store up so much 

 excess heat that after a hundred millions of years or 

 thereabout four major planets are still in a molten state, 

 and the earth's interior is so hot as to melt granite and 

 every instant to threaten its own cataclysmic disruption ! 



