182 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



The complacent reader may think to himself that, 

 huge as these drains upon the rotational energy of the 

 earth seem to be, they must, nevertheless, be negligible 

 in comparison with their source, else our Newtonian 

 friends would not dare to draw upon that source so ex- 

 travagantly as they do. Now, it is easily possible to as- 

 certain the magnitude of this supply in terms of horse- 

 power within reasonable limits of accuracy. Assuming 

 that one-half of the earth's mass is contained within an 

 inner core 6,000 miles in diameter, and that the average 

 velocity of the whole mass is the same as the velocity of 

 any point on the equator of that core, the distance cov- 

 ered in a single second would be 1160 feet. This is mani- 

 festly an overestimate, seeing that, in the higher lati- 

 tudes, the velocity is necessarily much less, and, for con- 

 venience, we may arbitrarily reduce this quantity to 1116 

 feet per second, which, though still too high, happens to 

 be one-third of the orbital velocity of the moon and there- 

 fore simplifies the present calculation by furnishing us 

 with a convenient standard for comparison. 



Now in Chap. Ill, if you remember, I computed the 

 energy value of the momentum of the moon, traveling as 

 she does at the rate of 3350 feet per second, to be 2,112 

 trillions of horse-power days (8.8 x 240 trillions). Multi- 

 plying this quantity, then, by 81 because of the earth's 

 greater mass, but dividing the product by 9 (the square of 

 3, since the energy varies with the square of the velocity) 

 because of her slower (axial) speed, we obtain the sum of 

 20,000 trillions as the total number of horse-power days 

 "stored" in the earth's axial momentum at this given 

 instant. Compare this solitary energy asset now, if you 

 please, with our liabilities as previously appraised, and 

 you will be startled to find that were it to be applied 

 solely to the sustentation of the equatorial ring it would 

 on the basis of Newton's version be 300 times too feeble 

 to so much as even budge the weight, and on mine it would 

 exhaust itself in the brief space of less than a single hour, 

 or if applied wholly to the raising of the tides, in just 250 

 days ! What is the answer? How comes it that our asset 



