BREAKING UP THE ATOM.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 August 1921, Page 10

BREAKING UP THE ATOM.

PROFESSOR RUTHERFORD’S DISCOVERIES. London, June 14. Playing billiards with balls 1-30,000.-000th part of an inch in diameter, or thereabouts, and incidentally causing matter to crumble uja and disintegrate, was described in a lecture given yesterday by Professor Sir Ernest Rutherford before 'the Physical Society at the Imperial College of Science, Kensington. One of the recent discoveries made by the renowned physicist is that by driving numbers of the alpha particles (which are continuously given off by radium) into a gas such as hydrogen, one such alpha particle in ten million or so will collide “dead-on” with a hydrogen atom and send it forward with such a spurt that it will travel four times its normal distance. So great is the energy contained in the atom that prodigious forces were at work, he said, in these collisions.

Similar experiments carried out with nitrogen have led to a remarkable dis-

covery— that by making alpha particles charge into the atoms and drive them forward, the. collisions break up the structure of the atom to some extent, and some of the nitrogen is automatically set free as hydrogen. A partial transmutation.—infinitely small at present —into hydrogen has been effected by making the alpha particles change into atoms of fluorine, sodium. aluminium, and phosphorus. Thus the actual disintegration of what has been looked upon for centur- . ies as unalterable matter has been efi fected by a man-controlled process, and elements of a certain definite type have been partially transmuted into the parent substance of all matter—hx&QKaih..