Rainbow More Beautiful Through Science

Nor ever yet The melting rainbow's vernal-tinctur'd hues To me have shone so pleasing, as when first the hand of science pointed out the path In which the sun-beams gleaming from the west Fall on the watery cloud.

 Terrors Flee Reason

As soon as your reasoning, sprung from that godlike mind, lifts up its voice to proclaim the nature of the universe, then the terrors of the mind take flight, the ramparts of the world roll apart, and I see the march of events throughout the whole of space. The majesty of the gods [4] is revealed and those quiet habitations, never shaken by storms or drenched by rain-clouds or defaced by white drifts of snow which a harsh frost congeals. A cloudless ether roofs them and laughs with radiance l...

 The Heat of Our Bodies is Sunbeams

Breathe upon your hand, and feel how hot your breath is; well, that heat which you feel, was once in a sunbeam, and has travelled from it through the food you have eaten, and has now been at work keeping up the heat of your body.

 Color is the Light Beams Things Do Not Want

But the reflected light-waves do more for us than this. They not only make us see things, but they make us see them in different colours. What, you will ask, is this too the work of the sunbeams? Certainly; for if the colour we see depends on the size of the waves which come back to us, then we must see things coloured differently according to the waves they send back. For instance, imagine a sunbeam playing on a leaf: part of its waves bound straight back from it to our eye and make us see t...

 How to Enter the Fairy Land of Science

How are you to enter the fairy-land of science? There is but one way. Like the knight or peasant in the fairy tales, you must open you eyes. There is no lack of objects, everything around you will tell some history if touched with the fairy wand of imagination. I have often thought, when seeing some sickly child drawn along the street, lying on its back while other children romp and play, how much happiness might be given to sick children at home or in hospitals, if only they were told the s...

 Burning Coals Warms Us With the Warmth of the Sun

From the cold garden, you run into the house, and find the fire laid indeed in the grate, but the wood dead and the coals black, waiting to be lighted. You strike a match, and soon there is a blazing fire. Where does the heat come from? Why do the coals burn and give out a glowing light? Have you not read of gnomes buried down deep in the earth, in mines, and held fast there till some fairy wand has released them, and allowed them to come to earth again? Well, thousands and millions of years ...

 The Natural Economy is Solar Powered

The natural economy is solar-powered. Photons from the sun rain down upon the entire daytime surface of the planet. Many photons do nothing more useful than heat up a rock or a sandy beach. A few find their way into an eye - yours, or mine, or the compound eye of a shrimp or the parabolic reflector eye of a scallop. Some may happen to fall on a solar panel - either a man-made one like those that, in a fit of green zeal, I have just installed on my roof to heat the bathwater, or a green leaf, ...