The Dying Sun
Sir,
James Hopwood Jeans was a great scientist and the writer of the “Theory of the
creation of the Universe.” In this essay, the writer has given an idea about
the creation of our earth. He suggests that the creation of our earth and the
other planets took place as a result of an accidental process. He, however,
later, modified his theory. After reading this extract, we understand that
writer possesses great power of expressing scientific knowledge to common people
quite successfully.
Sir James begins this essay by saying that there are uncountable stars in
the universe. Only a few stars are there which are hardly bigger than the earth.
Most of the stars is very small as compared to them. Also, there are huge
distances among these stars and these seldom come near to one another. This is
the scheme of the universe by nature.
The write is of the view that some two thousand million years ago, by
chance, a very rare event took place. This event resulted in the creation of our
earth. A big star wandering blindly through space happened to cone near the sun.
As the Sun and the Moon raise tides on our earth, this second star raised tides
on the surface of the tides that are produced on our earth by the sun and the
moon. As the second star came nearer and nearer, the magnetic tidal pull would
become greater and greater until it had formed a huge mountain on the surface of
the sun. Before this second star began to move away again its small parts of
itself into space. They began to revolve around the sun. These are the planets
of various sizes and our earth is one of those pieces.
The sun is very hot and same is true for all the pieces thrown off into
space. At the time of ‘its creation, the temperature of the earth was very
high. Due to this any sort of life was not able to exist on it. Gradually, These
pieces started radiating their heat into space and in this process they become
cooler. With the passage of time, one of thee pieces gave birth to life. The
writer is not sure when and how life appeared on any one of the pieces, However,
he opines that life must have started in a very simple form that had no capacity
buy to live and reproduce it self before dying. From these humble beginnings,
increasingly complex organisms were produced. Modern human being is the most
complex form of life on the earth.
Lastly, Sir James compares our earth with a grain of sand. He says that
we get much frightened if we try to discover the nature and the nature and the
purpose of this great universe that surrounds us in space and time. We also find
the universe frightening because of its unlimited distances. We can not
understand these distances due to our limited knowledge. Then the stretches of
time are so great that these are beyond our understanding. The human home is
nothing with time and space. This is why, life is not possible either on the
stars of anywhere in the universe. Life can only exist in such a temperate zone
where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold. Above all, the most
important reason that frightens is that we do not fond any sign of life like our
own that exists except on our earth.
So, according to the writer, life does not seem to have any part in the plan of the universe. Keeping this in mind, person seems insignificant and petty in the great plan of the universe. This situation deprives human beings of being “Crown of the Creation.”