Exploding Universe

Many a puzzled British housewife waited anxiously last week for the world to blow to pieces. As these matrons sat in their comfortable homes, a quiet voice from the radio had told them that the universe was nothing but a bursting soap bubble. "It is easy to blow a soap bubble," said the voice, "but far less easy to keep it in existence more than a minute or two--after that it is apt to disappear. If hope I shall not startle you too much if I say . . . that the universe is like that . . . expanding--I might almost say exploding--at a terrific rate. The results of measuring the speeds of nebulae were sensational. The last to be investigated was found to be receding from us at a rate of 26,000,000 miles per hour. . . . The material universe appears to be passing away like a tale that is told. . . ." The voice continued to draw a picture of cosmic destruction. Although there are as many stars as raindrops falling on a wet London day, the universe now is almost empty. Our small earth is "like a ship on an empty ocean." "Leave only three wasps alive in the whole of Europe and Europe will be more crowded with wasps than space with stars."/- The quiet voice belonged to Sir James Hopwood Jeans, famed Cambridge astronomer-mathematician. Two months ago he had described his bubble universe in a notable lecture to British scientists and students at Cambridge. Most of them were alraedy familiar with the facts behind the cosmic picture he drew. Dr. Einstein in his original relativity theory stated that space is curved by the matter it contains, that the size of the finite universe is dependent upon matter. Abbe Lemaitre, Belgian mathematician, investigated Einstein's universe, found that it would be unstable, would necessarily either expand to infinity or contract to a point. Immediately astronomers looked at the stars, measured the amount of spectral shift in starlight (the Doppler effect). They found most starlight shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, interpreted it to mean movement away from the earth (TIME, Oct. 6), concluded that material bodies were spreading, expanding universal boundaries. Dr. Fritz Zwicky of California Institute of Technology and Dr. P. ten Brieggencate, Dutch astronomer, however, have suggested that some of the red shift is caused not by real movement but by gravitational pulls exerted on light by the stars and nebulae it passes. Other scientists suggest the red shift may be a result of the great distance through which light travels.

/- Latest sky census taken by Dr. Edwin Powell Hubble, Mt. Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, reported 30 million galaxies, star systems.

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