The Source of Solar Energy

Abstract

IT is, I think, rather unfortunate that Mr. Proctor, in his recent work entitled “More Worlds than One,” should have re-advocated the earlier and now discarded views of Sir W. Thomson concerning the source of solar heat or energy by meteoric percussion. That theory, however ingenious as advanced by the physicist, is surely hardly one to be admitted by the astronomer. Nothing less than an intense desire or necessity for finding some solution to the problem, whence or how the solar heat is maintained, could have encouraged scientific men seriously to advance or support so plausible and unsatisfactory a doctrine, or one, when examined, so little supported by what we really know either of meteors or of nature's laws. Having given much attention to meteoric astronomy, may I be permitted briefly to state what I hold are serious and practical objections to the validity of the meteoric or dynamical theory as applied to the conservation of solar heat and energy.