INSIDE THE ATOM.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 August 1921, Page 9

INSIDE THE ATOM.

J’AST STORES OF ENERGY. (SIR J. THOMPSON'S RESEARCH. The low-spirited patriot who wonders if we are a decaying race ought to take a dose of science occasionally. We are, in many respects, not the most brilliant generation that England has seen (says John ©’London’s Weekly). We have no Byron and Shelly, no Fox and .Pitt, no Nelson and Wellington. But we have a body of scientific men who, in sheer intellectual power and great achievements, keep our repute for mental vigor as bright as ever. Take, for instance, the roasters of what Js called, in the narrower sense, physical science. What other country' could shew a constellation to outshine the group of physicists and chemists which has brought honor to England in recent years—Lord Kelvin and Baron Rayleigh, Sir James Dewar and Sir L J. Thompson. Sir A. Rucker and Sir E. Rutherford, Professor Soddy and Sir W. Crookea and Sir O. Lodge?

PROFESSOR AT TWENTY-SEVEN.

When Sir Ernest Rutherford and Sir Joseph Thomson appeared together at the British Association meeting at Winnipeg in 1909, the American scientific Press wondered that one country could own two such masters of their science. It is difficult, in fact, to choose of these men, but perhaps the fine figure of Sir J. J. Thomson, will be best representative of this branch of British science.

Tn the year 1884 it was necessary to appoint a Cavrndish Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge University. The two men who had previously occupied the chair were intellectual giants—Taanes Clerk Maxwell and Lord Rayleigh. Who would bo third? Sleepy old dons in that ancient seat of learning were astounded when they heard that a young man of 27, Joseph John Thomson, had been appointed. Is Cambridge so poor, they asked, tn at it turns to “boys”? To-day 7, perhaps, Cambridge has no prouder ornament than ‘ the man on whom the scientific world has showered it honors so thicklv.

The general public has merely a vague idea that a clever Polish-French lady was lucky enough to drop across radium in 1898. The fact is, of course, that Professor Curie and his wife were systematically following out the work of their predecessors. For half a century physicists had been on the track of some deep secret of nature of which they caught occasional glimpses. But the difficulties were tremendous. Let us put it in this way. Take the dot over the letter “i” as it is printed on this page. We know—we knew before 1898—that several million atoms of matter could be accommodated in a single line, shoulder to shoulder, so to . speak, across the breadth of that tiny spot of ink! What the physicists and chemists were trying to do was to get inside one of these extraordinary minute atoms and see what it was made j of. Sir J. J. Thomson was the first to do So. WEIGHED AND MEASURED, The discovery did not depend so exclusively on radium as people imagine. Long before 1898 Sir W. Crookes had. though no one knew it, got the same phenomena by discharging electricity through little tubes of rare gas. Thomson was following this up, and the new discovery of radium gave the clue .These tiny atoms of matter were breaking up into particles which were far mor* minute. How. could anybody even make a mental picture of such inconceivably small things? Sir J. J. Thomson did not merely get a mental picture of them. He made them register themselves on photographs. He weighed them, measured them, ascertained their speed, and gave the world a wonderful suggestion of how they lived within the tiny dimensions of an atom. He directed thin streams of them on to a target which lit up as each particle struck it. Tie made them trace luminous paths through artificial fogs, so that they could ho photographed. He -found and proved that tho smallest of these particles—“corpuscles,” he called them, though they arc now known as “electrons”—-were so minute that, to put it in his own recent words, “their linear dimensions are only about one-hundredth-thousanclth part of those of atoms”; and it would take hundreds of millions of atoms in a continuous line to stretch across the face of a penny. ENERGY BEYOND DREAMS’. Very interesting, you may say, but does it cut any ice? You may remember, on reflection, that this question was asked, rather disdainfully, when scientific men made the researches which led to the utilisation of gas, steam or electricity. In this case there is an oven greater possibility. These electrons are shot out of the atoms of matter at a speed which may reach, in good condition, 163,000 miles a second. Here is looked up in the atoms all kinds of matter energy beyond all our dreams. The energy contained in a farthing is equal to 80,000,000 horse power. There, is more energy in the atoms of a square foot of coal than we shall get in rhe ordinary way out of all the. coal tn Britain.

Whether or no we shall succeed In tapping this energy remains to &e scon. In any case we have male a prodigious stride in the understanding oi nature, which is the first condition of our being able to develop its splendid resources. The atoms of all. kinds of matter are little worlds of these infinitesimial elec trons—magazines of extraordinary energy. Every arc lamp is shooting them out at, a prodigious - speed. The sun pouring them out in floods. They are “atoms of electricity,” and it may be said in a sense that the whole material world is made up electricity. It is something, at least to have * mastered the nature of that wonderful force. Sir J. J. Thomson’s first suggestion of the way in which these electrons are held together in the atom may give place to others, but the substance of his brilliant work remains.