RADIUMS TREMENDOUS ENERGY.

Taranaki Daily News, 24 April 1916, Page 6

RADIUMS TREMENDOUS ENERGY.

IF IT WERE LET LOOSE! Sir Ernest Rutherford, thfe distinguished scientist, lias been pointing' out, in Manchester, the tremendous energy looked up in radium. If it were only let loose! , .Speaking of wf intense energy contained in tlies.fi. substances,, Sir Ernest said that what scientists, wanted to ascertain was hbw we could release at will the energy contained in radiuni and utilise it for oitr own. purposes.. If that energy could be made available we should enter upon a new era in the supply of cheap energy, because it had to be borne in mind that in releasing such energy at any fate we desih>d. it would be possible for one pound of the material to obtain as much practically as from one 'hxmdred' miliifcrti pounds of eoal. Fortunately at the present time we had not found out, a method of so dealin" with these forces, and'personally he was very hopeful we shofild not discover it until man was living at peace with his neighbor. There was no doubt if it was once discovered that we could accelerate these influences a few hundredweights of such material would shake, if not rend, the earth. Sir Ernest Rutherford said the ordinary atom's with which we were familiar had the property, as far as we knew, of hcing permanent and indestructible, but the atoms of which he proposed to speak might be taken as atoms of unstable nlements—elements which did not last for ever, but bad a certain defined and limited life, disappearing and giving rise to a series of other substances. In radium and other radio-active substances we were witnessing, for the first time in nature, the actual cause of the transformation of matter. It was not a cause we could influence at all; At had always been going on 111 nature and in the history of this planet, dadiuin was several million times more active than the mineral from which it was derived. Enormous improvement had been made in the study of the properties of these radio-active substances, and the separation of radium had entered on a very large commercial scale. Sir Ernest gave demonstrations of the intensity of the radio-active emanations, and showed their" action on a photographic plate, and the phosphorescence they occasioned when brought into the close neighborhood of certain salt' Radiation from radium, he said, wai iei times more penetrating than any pMic trating influence he knew of. liailton and radio-active substances had ai enormous interest from the sciciti/ point of view, and recently thev ha been utilised greatly from the standpoint In the treatment of cr; dtoaMfc '