ATOM SMASHED

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 160, 29 February 1932, Page 2

ATOM SMASHED

BROKEN DOWN BY USE OF 3,000,000 YOLT FORCE. ACHIEVEMENT OF SCIENTIST. The atom has been smashed. Dr. Robert A. Millikan, the most famous United States physicist and a seientist of world renown, ftiade this announcement. casually when he disembarked from the Aquitania, writes the New York correspondent of the London "Daily Herald." Ho was on his way back to his • home at Pasadena, Calif ornia, from Germany. "Dr. Carl D. Anderson and I have succeeded in smashing the atom," he said, "by making use of an electro-motive force of about three million volts. This tremendous concentration of electrical energy easily distfeitegrated atoms. The electrons which they contained scattered with the speed of light (186,000 miles a second), while their protons scattered at half that speed." ^Every atom, according to physical theory, resembles something like a minute solar system. Its "sun" is a very dense nucleus composed of protons. Round this spin at incredible velocities varying numbers of electrons. The protons and electrons in each different kind of atom are identical. The differences between the atoms depend on the number of electrons in each. Electrons have often been expelled from atoms as a result of various expefimenters' work. But Dr. Millikan is the first to I claim that he has "shattered" an atom. scattering electrons and protons in space, and completely destroying the atomic structure which his experiment attacked.