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COSMOLOGY: OLD AND NEW
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with a piece or ieel or a sheet of glass can be cut with a piece of diamond, so we say steel is harder than copper or diamond is harder than glass.
The modern chemist has grouped all kind of matter into 92 forms of chemical elements, of which the densities vary from element to element. Hydrogen is the lightest and platinum or osmium are amongst the heaviest elements known. Taking water as the standard substance, gold is about 19 times heavier volume for volume osmium about 23 times. But as we have referred on page 13 ante forms of matter thousands of times denser than the densest substance on earth have been discovered in the interior of stars. 2?? Just as in the case of hardness it is impossible to prepare a list of the infinite variety of substances of varying shades of hardness, so is found to be the case with densities of materials. The density of matter in nebulae is extremely thin-of the order of 10-24, i.e., ___ ,
1000000000000000000000000 of the density of water. 273 On the other hand, there are stars in which the density of matter is of the order 620 tons per cubic inch, i.e., 38440000 times denser than water. The same view has been expressed by H. Ward in a more mild tone thus :
"There are stars whose volume is a hundred millon times that of our sun, composed of matter a million times less dense
matter of our sun.274 Also there are stars composed of matter two thousand times as dense as gold, so that a pint of it would weight nineteen tons. "275
When one compares the lightest piece of matter existing in nature with the heaviest the above figures show that the latter is 38440000000000000000000000000000 times denser than the former. What surprise is there therefore when a Jaina Acarya declares :
प्रत्येकं संख्येयासंख्येयानन्तभेदाश्च भवन्ति । that the 20 attributes of matter have got a finite number of
272. "Astronomical evidence seems to leave practically no doubt that in the so-called 'White dwarf stars the density of matter far transcends anything of which we have terrestrial experience; in the companion of Sirius, for example, the density is about a ton to the cubic inch".
-The Nature of the Physical World, by Eddington, p. 203 273. The Internal Constitution of the Stars by Eddington, p.332. 274. The mean density of the sun is only 1.3 relative to water. 275. Exploring the Universe, p. 11.
