comets

88:1.1Prim­i­tive man al­ways wanted to make any­thing ex­traor­di­nary into a fe­tish; chance there­fore gave ori­gin to many. A man is sick, some­thing hap­pens, and he gets well. The same thing is true of the rep­u­ta­tion of many medicines and the chance meth­ods of treat­ing dis­ease. Ob­jects con­nected with dreams were likely to be con­verted into fe­tishes. Vol­ca­noes, but not moun­tains, be­came fe­tishes; comets, but not stars. Early man re­garded shoot­ing stars and me­te­ors as in­di­cat­ing the ar­rival on earth of spe­cial vis­it­ing spir­its.

15:6.13Many comets are un­estab­lished wild off­spring of the so­lar mother wheels, which are be­ing grad­u­ally brought un­der con­trol of the cen­tral gov­ern­ing sun. Comets also have nu­mer­ous other ori­gins. A comet’s tail points away from the at­tract­ing body or sun be­cause of the elec­tri­cal re­ac­tion of its highly ex­panded gases and be­cause of the ac­tual pres­sure of light and other en­er­gies em­a­nat­ing from the sun. This phe­nom­e­non con­sti­tutes one of the pos­i­tive proofs of the re­al­ity of light and its as­so­ci­ated en­er­gies; it demon­strates that light has weight. Light is a real sub­stance, not sim­ply waves of hy­po­thet­i­cal ether.

15:6.12Mi­nor Space Bod­ies. The me­te­ors and other small par­ti­cles of mat­ter cir­cu­lat­ing and evolv­ing in space con­sti­tute an enor­mous ag­gre­gate of en­ergy and ma­te­rial sub­stance.

49:3.2There are so very few of the non­breather type of in­hab­ited worlds in Sa­ta­nia be­cause this more re­cently or­ga­nized sec­tion of Nor­la­ti­adek still abounds in me­te­oric space bod­ies; and worlds with­out a pro­tec­tive fric­tion at­mo­sphere are sub­ject to in­ces­sant bom­bard­ment by these wan­der­ers. Even some of the comets con­sist of me­teor swarms, but as a rule they are dis­rupted smaller bod­ies of mat­ter.