HIDDEN ENERGY.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 April 1920, Page 10

HIDDEN ENERGY.

JHE BRINK OF. DISCOVERY, EXTRACTING ATOMIC FORCES. London, December 12. Sir Charles Parsons, presiding at the Trueman Wood lecture, at the Royal Society of Arts, delivered by Sir Oliver Lodge, on "Sources of Power, Known and Unknown," said the engineers saw clearly that some other source of energy beyond coal and the burning of oxygen of the air must be discovered. The utmost that they could do at present was to utilise water power. "In England it is especially incumbent upon us to encourage this wonderful research. Our coal supplies are only 2>/ 2 per cent, of those of the world, and our water supply almost negligible—not more than 1 per cent, of the world's total." "All that the human race can do in the material world," said Sir Oliver, "is to move matter. All our physical activ-ities-can be summed up as the movement of matter. The mind is in a different category, and when we think or will, or remember, suffer or enjoy, we are not necessarily moving matter, although usually some brain process accompanies these mental operations. Every form of physical activity requires power, and so power or energy is the most pressing material need of man." Instead of consuming coal and burning up the air in order to drive machinery, the time will come, he predicted, when energy will be obtained from a few ounces of matter. He explained that atomic energy was rather inaccessible, but not hopelessly so. "All atoms possess energy, but some cannot hold it all. These are the radio-active elements, and they periodically Are off projectiles with more than volcanic violence. A radium atom firing off a particle, which turns out to be a positively charged atom of helium, is like a 2-ton gun firing a 100pound shot. Before it has exhausted its ammunition it fires off five such projectiles, and then settles down into a quieter existence as lead, or something chemically indistinguishable from that substance.

"It would seem that all substances of very high atomic weight are liable to behave in this way; it is only a question of degree. And it is not by any means their whole energy they expend and get rid of —their waste energy—that we perceive. When its active transformations have ceased and left it in n stable state, like lead, gold, silver, copper, iron or any common element, we are not to suppose that because it is quiescent therefore it has no store of internal energy. Anyone looking at cordite might think it harmless, and so it is till a suitable stimulus is applied."

Sir Oliver calculated that the energy in a couple of grains of matter moving at one-tenth the speed of light would raise 100,000 tons 3000 ft.

As to the possibility of utilising this energy, he pointed to the wonderfiil development of wireless sciencp. "It is the beginning of the harnessing of the properties of the atom," he said. "I think we are on the brink of a discovery It may take a century, but I do not suppose our descendants will be using chemical energy. Instead of burning 1000 tons of coal, they will take the energy out of an ounce or two of matter.