THE POWER OF RADIUM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 464, 29 July 1909, Page 3

THE POWER OF RADIUM.

Professor Sir J. J. Thomson, who lectured at the Royal Institution, London, recently, made some remarkable statements about the energy developed by radium. Radium gave out about a million times as much energy, he said, as was given by an equal weight of oxygen when it combined with hydrogen. It was developed by rapidly moving atoms of helium shot out with incredible velocity, approaching one - tenth that of light.

Where the energy came from to give these heavy things this enormous velocity, was a most interesting problem. He asked them to imagine the state of other atoms being bombarded by these helium particles as large as themselves. The condition of a ship exposed to fire of Dreadnoughts would be child’s play compared with the condition of an atom exposed to a battery of these particles. If they imagined a town exposed to a bombardment of shots as large as houses and moving a thousand times more quickly than any shot ever fired from a cannon, they would have some idea of the condition of a gas exposed to the battery of radium. Every helium particle left 30,000 wrecks of molecules of the gas it was bombarding.