Nothing

Capt. T. J. J. See, Government mathematician and astronomer at the Mare Island naval base (San Francisco, Cal.), has been conducting exhaustive experiments and computations upon--Nothing. Greater men than he have done the same, and he has been utilizing their findings -- Sir Isaac Newton (gravity), Pierre Simon LaPlace (astronomy), Sir Christopher Wren (architecture). Nothing is important, for it permeates and envelops Everything. It would be nice to know definite things about it, what it is and does. Last week Capt. See announced something about Nothing :

It may be called Nothing for it is entirely imperceptible to the senses of man. Only by inference and mental conception has man discovered that Nothing exists. Capt. See calls it "the world gas" instead of by its more familar name, ether. It is the substance that fills all the spaces among the heavenly planets, among the planets' composite molecules, among the molecules' composite atoms. To do this it must, of course, be a very tenuous and insinuating substance. Capt. See figures it is 47 billion times less dense than hydrogen, the thinnest gas known. Its particles are 4,000 times smaller than hydrogen molecules, (the smallest known). So fast are these particles moving (as shown by the tenuousness of the substance) that they go 23.5 times as fast as the fastest electron (electric particle circling an atom's nucleus) and 57% faster than light. They go, in fact, 294,000 mi. per sec.

With such particles "world gas" is, of course, highly elastic--about 689 billion times as elastic as air, Capt. See figured, in proportion to its density. And this elasticity, which accounts physically for the speed with which light traverses space, coupled with another property, is what (according to See) accounts for gravity and the fixture in space of heavenly bodies such as the earth, the moon, the sun. The other property is the weight of world gas.

There is so much of it that, light though its particles are, it weighs with a great weight upon earth, moon, sun. Against its pressure they cannot fly out of their orbits though their circling speed, imparted at birth, is not checked by the yielding mass. How strongly the world gas acts as marshal of the spheres was suggested by Capt. See:

"Exact calculation shows that if we had five trillion cables of steel, each a foot in diameter and the steel capable of lifting thirty tons to the square inch of the cross section, this whole giant forest of steel cable would be stretched to the breaking point to hold the moon in its orbit about the earth. To hold the earth in its orbit about the sun would require an 11-inch cable of such steel on each square foot of hemispherical cross section of our globe, which practically would cover the earth's surface with such a forest of steel cable, each stretched to the limit of its tensile strength."