If to-day you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the æther or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard… - Arthur Eddington

What is the source of heat which the sun and the stars are continually squandering? The answer given is almost unanimous... the gravitational energy converted as the star steadily contracts. ...Lord Kelvin showed that this hypothesis, due to Helmholtz, necessarily dates the birth of the sun about 20,000,000 years ago; and he made strenuous efforts to induce geologists and biologists to accommodate... But... outrageous violations of this limit have prevailed. ...Sir 's theory of the earth-moon system, to the present Lord Raleigh's ...age of terrestrial rocks from occluded helium, and to all modern discussions of the statistical equilibrium of the stellar system. No one seems to have any hesitation... in carrying back the history of the earth long before the supposed date of formation of the solar system... in some cases... this appears... justified by experimental evidence... difficult to dispute. Lord Kelvin's date of the creation of the sun is treated with no more respect than Archbishop Ussher's.

At terrestrial temperatures matter has complex properties which are likely to prove most difficult to unravel; but it is reasonable to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.

All change is relative. The universe is expanding relatively to our common material standards; our material standards are shrinking relatively to the size of the universe. The theory of the "expanding universe" might also be called the theory of the "shrinking atom". […] Let us then take the whole universe as our standard of constancy, and adopt the view of a cosmic being whose body is composed of intergalactic spaces and swells as they swell. Or rather we must now say it keeps the same size, for he will not admit that it is he who has changed. Watching us for a few thousand million years, he sees us shrinking; atoms, animals, planets, even the galaxies, all shrink alike; only the intergalactic spaces remain the same. The earth spirals round the sun in an ever‑decreasing orbit. It would be absurd to treat its changing revolution as a constant unit of time. The cosmic being will naturally relate his units of length and time so that the velocity of light remains constant. Our years will then decrease in geometrical progression in the cosmic scale of time. On that scale man's life is becoming briefer; his threescore years and ten are an ever‑decreasing allowance. Owing to the property of geometrical progressions an infinite number of our years will add up to a finite cosmic time; so that what we should call the end of eternity is an ordinary finite date in the cosmic calendar. But on that date the universe has expanded to infinity in our reckoning, and we have shrunk to nothing in the reckoning of the cosmic being. We walk the stage of life, performers of a drama for the benefit of the cosmic spectator. As the scenes proceed he notices that the actors are growing smaller and the action quicker. When the last act opens the curtain rises on midget actors rushing through their parts at frantic speed. Smaller and smaller. Faster and faster. One last microscopic blurr of intense agitation. And then nothing.