Читать книгу The New Astronomy онлайн

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As to the distance of ninety-three million miles, a cannon-ball would travel it in about fifteen years. It may help us to remember that at the speed attained by the Limited Express on our railroads a train which had left the sun for the earth when the “Mayflower” sailed from Delftshaven with the Pilgrim Fathers, and which ran at that rate day and night, would in 1887 still be a journey of some years away from its terrestrial station. The fare at the customary rates, it may be remarked, would be rather over two million five hundred thousand dollars, so that it is clear that we should need both money and leisure for the journey.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of the sun’s distance is given by expressing it in terms of what the physiologists would call velocity of nerve transmission. It has been found that sensation is not absolutely instantaneous, but that it occupies a very minute time in travelling along the nerves; so that if a child puts its finger into the candle, there is a certain almost inconceivably small space of time, say the one-hundredth of a second, before he feels the heat. In case, then, a child’s arm were long enough to touch the sun, it can be calculated from this known rate of transmission that the infant would have to live to be a man of over a hundred before it knew that its fingers were burned.