Sunspots Down

The whirlpools of cooling, erupting gas on the sun, called sunspots, wax and wane in cycles of about eleven years, although some intervals have been as short as eight years, others as long as 16. In 1933 sunspot activity suddenly turned upward after languishing near the bottom of a cycle (TIME, Nov. 13, 1933). Since then sunspots have made much news, growing bigger and more frequent, disrupting transatlantic wireless communication and fostering brilliant displays of the aurora borealis. Astronomers looked forward to a peak of activity in 1938 or 1939.

Since sunspot behavior is irregular, it is sometimes impossible to tell that a peak or a trough has been passed until many months afterward. At a summer meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Ottawa last week, Dr. Harlan True Stetson of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported that the peak of the current cycle had been reached and passed in July 1937. The spots are now on the downgrade therefore, and the world can look forward to a minimum of magnetic storms and to uninterrupted radio communication for four or five more years.

Dr. Stetson is the author of Sunspots and Their Effects (TIME, Nov. 22), in which he ventured the opinion that sunspots may affect human psychology through such channels as vitamin intake, electrical effects on nerve impulses, electrified particles in the air. Hence, since business activity is "fundamentally a curve of mass psychology," sunspots may affect stockmarket prices and other indices of prosperity. From 1929 through the Depression bottom of 1932 to the highs of 1937, the correspondence between active sunspots and booming business has been remarkably close. Last week it was also seen that the July 1937 sunspot peak preceded the August market break by only a few weeks. Thus Depression II may be linked to the current sunspot downgrade. But no temporary outburst of sunspots was reported to accompany last week's ebullient stockmarket (see p. 52).

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