14 THE OCEAN RIVER 



sions of fiction the present stage of scientific deduction still 

 holds much of the answer in suspense. The sciences of modern 

 oceanography and geophysics are day by day co-ordinating new 

 discoveries as they accumulate^ and modern man can still help 

 solve the story as he reads it. 



Over a hundred and fifty years ago a French scientist, the 

 Marquis de Laplace, proposed the now familiar nebula the- 

 ory of creation, namely that the sun exploded into a huge 

 rotating ball of incandescent vapor or nebula of the kind we 

 see today in parts of the Milky Way. The mass began to con- 

 tract, and — as Laplace suggested — to speed up in its rotation 

 and then throw off gaseous matter in the form of rings like 

 those that surround Saturn. These rings eventually condensed 

 and formed the planets. Today this theory is not generally 

 accepted, because it does not explain the fact that the planets 

 with a fraction of the sun's bulk nevertheless have fifty times 

 its energy of rotation. 



Modern scientists, such as Sir James Jeans and Professor 

 Jeffreys, have suggested that at one time the passage of a great 

 star close to the sun formed tidal waves that pulled away 

 gaseous masses, and that these have split up and condensed 

 into our planets. Still others say this occurred after a direct 

 collision between the sun and another star. None of these 

 ideas is completely acceptable to all scientists, for various 

 mathematical reasons; the question remains open. Most re- 

 cently it has been proposed by von Weizsacker that the sun 

 at one time passed through a mass of cold gases and dust par- 

 ticles, such as we know exist in the universe, and that the 

 gravitational pull of the sun collected this mass into a huge 

 whirling disc which later broke up into cores of denser matter. 

 These denser cosmic nuclei continued to attract cosmic dust 

 until the planets formed. We can see that even the best minds 

 have not yet come to agreement. One thing we can be sure of : 

 our solar system is the result of a single gigantic cosmic event 



