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Wildness of Astronomical Conjectures vs. The Sure Premise of Cellular Cosmogony
**Editorial transcription, lightly normalized from the scan. Line-break hyphenation, spacing, capitalization, and unmistakable OCR errors have been repaired; the claims remain those of The Flaming Sword.
Astronomers watch the creation of a new sun nearly six billion miles away! This impressive spectacle has been heralded from Mount Wilson Observatory. Astronomers are on the qui vive to adjust themselves to the new discovery. The first noted fact deduced, relative to this startling exhibition of aerial prowess in directing the telescope at the heavens, is that it demolishes Laplace’s nebular hypothesis. Another theory reversed!
The French lexicographer, Larousse, defines nebula as a mass of indistinct stars—for example, the Milky Way is a nebula. The great nebula in Orion has been seen, observed, and photographed times without number. Now what is the difference between a spiral nebula and any other? One has a nucleus that is describing a spiral. The new world apparently sent off into space has been seen to be detached from the central luminous area of the larger nebula, and is now supposedly at a distance of six billion miles from its parent. Astronomers are holding their breath to see whether centripetal force will attract it to an elliptical orbit about its parent, or whether it will roam afar.
Koresh has defined nebula as an example of incomplete focalization. The merging energies not being brought to a complete focus, the combustion is not perfect as in an ordinary star. Any nebula, then, is an indistinct star or mass of stars. In this case it has (supposedly) required the highest power-mounted lens to bring it into the astronomer’s ken on account of its distance. It may, however, just as well be blurred and indistinct simply from its magnitude being lessened.
The swirling mass of gases discovered by the Mount Wilson 60-inch telescope is reported to be five hundred billion miles in diameter! These enormous figures are so conclusive! They strike the ordinary mortal blind with awe. There is nothing that bolsters up the Copernican hypothesis so much as its awe-inspiring mathematics. The most intricate calculations founded upon fundamentals that are absolutely erroneous, astonish and bewilder the common people. They dare not dispute such sedulously compiled figures, so learnedly set forth, so amazingly ignorant at bottom.
If the arc of the earth’s surface has been measured and its curvature ascertained to be concave, then one knows that the dimensions of the universe are such as to preclude any of these enormous guesses. The first guess involved in these figures is that the universe is infinite. The second, that it had a definite beginning in time. The third, that the earth is a planet. The Koreshan Cosmogony disproves, by its argument founded upon fact and a real experiment, the wildness of astronomical conjectures.
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The source scans remain the record. This page preserves the periodical’s argument without presenting its conclusion as an independently established result.
The Flaming Sword · Vol. 25, No. 2 · Feb 1911 · PDF p. 15