Stars & Time

During his 69 years on this planet, Alan Spencer Hawkesworth of Washington, D. C., by profession a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, has served as mathematician in the Navy Department's Bureau of Ordnance, has lectured on philosophy, discovered some 100 new theorems in geometrical conies, become a cuneiform expert, passed through four South American revolutions and has seen ''heavy fighting in the West Indies and China Seas." Last week in a curt, confident article, "Stellar Distances and the Expanding Universe," published in Science, the aging worldling attacked the "fashionable concept" that the universe is getting bigger, labeled such theories "folly," assailed the views of Expansionists Eddington, Lemaitre, Hubble, De Sitter in 1,000 exasperated words.

Most astronomers say that the galaxies, unimaginably huge, stupendously scattered collections of stars, are running away from Earth and from each other at a rate of many thousands of miles per second. They back up their assertion by catching light from a galaxy in a spectrograph, measuring how far its spectral lines have shifted, in a given period, toward the red or violet end of the spectrum. If the lines redden, that implies the galaxy is receding from the observer, stretching out its light-waves, just as a train whistle lengthens its sound-waves, becomes flatter as it moves into the distance. Every galaxy which astronomers have spectrographed, except five comparatively near Earth, has shown this red shift.

Philosopher Hawkesworth argues that no one can tell where any galaxy is now because it takes millions of years for its light to reach astronomers on Earth. Astronomers cannot even locate the galaxy in respect to Earth at the time the light began its journey, since all heavenly bodies dart continuously through space, and Earth's position aeons ago is unknown. Above all, Philosopher Hawkesworth calls it absurd to plot relative positions of the galaxies, since observers can only note where they were at vastly differing times. Coming down to earth himself, he offers a simple illustration of his point. "A man in a Chevrolet motor car was driving eastward from 18th to 17th Streets along Pennsylvania Avenue [Washington] . . . at 40 m.p.h. at 10:30 a.m. of the forenoon of Jan. 30, 1936, and another man was similarly driving a Ford westward along the same section, from 17th to 18th, at 30 m.p.h. at 4 p. m. of the afternoon of Aug. 10, 1913. How swiftly are the two cars approaching? The question is obviously meaningless. The two cars are not approaching, nor in any way spatially related, for they are not in the same time-setting. . . . [Similarly] the stars and nebulae are all traveling at dizzy speeds along unknown and unpredictable paths . . . each in a different direction, whereof we can merely deduce the radial component at some long past instant. . . . The popular statements as to the distances of stars and nebulae, the size of the galaxy, and especially the 'expansion of the universe'. . . are foolish."

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