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THE MEMOIRS OF A CAT
solar system is a “freak”, that is, an exception to the laws of astronomical evolution. Jeans is the founder of the latest and generally accepted theory about the origin of the solar system. The theory is that trillions of years ago, a much larger star passcd closc by the sun, and pulled out of it a long trail of incandescent gas which cventually broke up into picces, which in consequence of their rotatory motion, inherited, so to say, from the sun, assumed spherical shapes. The gascous balls gradually cooled down and condensed to become the planets of our solar system. The cvolution of the physical Universe being governed by strictly deterministic laws, nothing purely accidental can happen. So, it is not altogether cxcluded that similar happenings that caused the birth of our solar system might take place somewhere and sometimc. But the probability against the repetition of such a happening is so great that, for practical purposes, it can be regarded as an inpossibility. On the basis of precise mathematical calculations, Jeans has come to the conclusion that, in a period of seven million years, only about one star in a hundred thousand will approach ncar enough to another for the birth of a solar system to be possible, and even then, there are odds perhaps of ten to one against a solar system actually being formed. The same authority has estimated that the growth of life is theoretically possible on a thousand million millionth part of the entire physical
