Physical Aspects of the Local Universe

41:6.1In de­ci­pher­ing spec­tral phe­nom­ena, it should be re­mem­bered that space is not empty; that light, in travers­ing space, is some­times slightly mod­i­fied by the var­i­ous forms of en­ergy and mat­ter which cir­cu­late in all or­ga­nized space. Some of the lines in­di­cat­ing un­known mat­ter which ap­pear in the spec­tra of your sun are due to mod­i­fi­ca­tions of well-known el­e­ments which are float­ing through­out space in shat­tered form, the atomic ca­su­al­ties of the fierce en­coun­ters of the so­lar el­e­men­tal bat­tles. Space is per­vaded by these wan­der­ing dere­licts, es­pe­cially sodium and cal­cium.

41:6.2Cal­cium is, in fact, the chief el­e­ment of the mat­ter-per­me­ation of space through­out Or­von­ton. Our whole super­uni­verse is sprin­kled with minutely pul­ver­ized stone. Stone is lit­er­ally the ba­sic build­ing mat­ter for the plan­ets and spheres of space. The cos­mic cloud, the great space blan­ket, con­sists for the most part of the mod­i­fied atoms of cal­cium. The stone atom is one of the most preva­lent and per­sis­tent of the el­e­ments. It not only en­dures so­lar ion­iza­tion—split­ting—but per­sists in an as­so­cia­tive iden­tity even af­ter it has been bat­tered by the de­struc­tive X rays and shat­tered by the high so­lar tem­per­a­tures. Cal­cium pos­sesses an in­di­vid­u­al­ity and a longevity ex­celling all of the more com­mon forms of mat­ter.

41:6.3As your physi­cists have sus­pected, these mu­ti­lated rem­nants of so­lar cal­cium lit­er­ally ride the light beams for var­ied dis­tances, and thus their wide­spread dis­sem­i­na­tion through­out space is tremen­dously fa­cil­i­tated. The sodium atom, un­der cer­tain mod­i­fi­ca­tions, is also ca­pa­ble of light and en­ergy lo­co­mo­tion. The cal­cium feat is all the more re­mark­able since this el­e­ment has al­most twice the mass of sodium. Lo­cal space-per­me­ation by cal­cium is due to the fact that it es­capes from the so­lar pho­to­sphere, in mod­i­fied form, by lit­er­ally rid­ing the out­go­ing sun­beams. Of all the so­lar el­e­ments, cal­cium, not­with­stand­ing its com­par­a­tive bulk—con­tain­ing as it does twenty re­volv­ing elec­trons—is the most suc­cess­ful in es­cap­ing from the so­lar in­te­rior to the realms of space. This ex­plains why there is a cal­cium layer, a gaseous stone sur­face, on the sun six thou­sand miles thick; and this de­spite the fact that nine­teen lighter el­e­ments, and nu­mer­ous heav­ier ones, are un­der­neath.

41:6.4Cal­cium is an ac­tive and ver­sa­tile el­e­ment at so­lar tem­per­a­tures. The stone atom has two ag­ile and loosely at­tached elec­trons in the two outer elec­tronic cir­cuits, which are very close to­gether. Early in the atomic strug­gle it loses its outer elec­tron; where­upon it en­gages in a mas­ter­ful act of jug­gling the nine­teenth elec­tron back and forth be­tween the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cir­cuits of elec­tronic rev­o­lu­tion. By toss­ing this nine­teenth elec­tron back and forth be­tween its own or­bit and that of its lost com­pan­ion more than twenty-five thou­sand times a sec­ond, a mu­ti­lated stone atom is able par­tially to defy grav­ity and thus suc­cess­fully to ride the emerg­ing streams of light and en­ergy, the sun­beams, to lib­erty and ad­ven­ture. This cal­cium atom moves out­ward by al­ter­nate jerks of for­ward propul­sion, grasp­ing and let­ting go the sun­beam about twenty-five thou­sand times each sec­ond. And this is why stone is the chief com­po­nent of the worlds of space. Cal­cium is the most ex­pert so­lar-prison es­ca­per.

41:6.5The agility of this ac­ro­batic cal­cium elec­tron is in­di­cated by the fact that, when tossed by the tem­per­a­ture-X-ray so­lar forces to the cir­cle of the higher or­bit, it only re­mains in that or­bit for about one one-mil­lionth of a sec­ond; but be­fore the elec­tric-grav­ity power of the atomic nu­cleus pulls it back into its old or­bit, it is able to com­plete one mil­lion rev­o­lu­tions about the atomic cen­ter.

41:6.6Your sun has parted with an enor­mous quan­tity of its cal­cium, hav­ing lost tremen­dous amounts dur­ing the times of its con­vul­sive erup­tions in con­nec­tion with the for­ma­tion of the so­lar sys­tem. Much of the so­lar cal­cium is now in the outer crust of the sun.

41:6.7It should be re­mem­bered that spec­tral anal­y­ses show only sun-sur­face com­po­si­tions. For ex­am­ple: So­lar spec­tra ex­hibit many iron lines, but iron is not the chief el­e­ment in the sun. This phe­nom­e­non is al­most wholly due to the pres­ent tem­per­a­ture of the sun’s sur­face, a lit­tle less than 6,000 de­grees, this tem­per­a­ture be­ing very fa­vor­able to the reg­istry of the iron spec­trum.