NEW THOERY OF MATTER.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVII, Issue 8121, 28 May 1906, Page 4

NEW THOERY OF MATTER.

There lias been developed within the last few years an electrical theory of matter, which is decidedly the most surprising physical doctrine of the age. Nowhere has more remarkable work been done in connection with this hypothesis than at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, and by no individual more brilliant results secured than by Professor J. J. Thomson, F.R.S., its director, who on Saturday, at the Hoyal Institution, commenced a course of lectures on the subject. The old atom of the chemists since Dalton's days has gone, and in its place we now have corpuscles which make up the atom; and instead of its being a single indivisible unit, it is regarded rather as a system 01 bodies, not unlike the sun and the planets, and there is among the moot recondite physicists a sort of " planetary theory of the atom." Following Sir William Crookes's experiinonto ~.u ,i-> iamous tube Professor Thom..uu scl co work to iiiiU the mass or ne,gut of the electric particles that are I,nrown ott when "a current is seat through a high vacuum. He found thai some of these particles were not more wiuu ooe-inousandth part of the muso of a hydrogen atom, and he gave them the name of corpuscles. The particles 11 question were all charged with negative electricity, and either they were electricity itself or they were the carrieio or electricity. On the former view they IKiw jien named electrons. One startling result et the professor's research was that the mass of the so-called corpuscle was always the same, no matter of what material the electrode was made from which the current was parsed through the tube; and this seems to mean that these corpuscles, or subatoms, or electrons are 11 the ultimate particles, common to matter of ail kinds," the protyle, of which Sir W. Orookei propliesied many years ago. If matter is an electrical manifestation what then is electricity? Dr. Larmor replies in an abstruse theory, which he has worked oat, it is a state of intrinsic strain in the universal medium or ether. Our electrical apparatus are machines for producing this strain. It was at first a grave objection to this doctrine that if atoms are made up of electrons or corpuscles they must be liable to break up, and the breaking up of an atom was then unknown. Radium disposed of that difficulty, for radium as visibly breaking up. Professor Thomson explained the processes by which he had measured the corpuscle, proved its electrical character, and measured its veloci y from 2000 to 60,000 miles per second.