END OF THE WORLD

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 50, Issue 268, 26 August 1930, Page 3

END OF THE WORLD

CAN WE POSTPONE IT? VISIONS OF SCIENCE. Visions of a day when a j’ear’s supply of fuel for a power station of the largest dimensions will be carried in a teacup filled with thirty grammes of water, and when it will be possible by the same means to rejuvenate the world by millions of years, were conjured up before the eyes of the delegates to the World’s Power Conference in Berlin in a lecture on ‘Sub-atomic Energy,’ by Sir Arthur Eddington, the British scientist and astronomer. Many famous German scientists were among the audience which listened to Sir Arthur. “The energy of which I speak, he said, “exists abundantly in everything that we see and handle, only it is securely locked away. “Einstein has taught us how we can calculate the amount of energy stored up in matter—sub-atomic energy, we call it. There seems to be no doubt that the heat and light given out by the sun and stars are supplied from this store, and that in the stars ‘the cup of water’ method of maintenance is actually in operation.” The sub-atomic energy, Sir Arthur said, could probably he realised by the conversion of tho amplest kind oi matter (hydrogen) into some complex elements by heating and maintaining terrestrial matter at a temperature of 40,000,000 deg. At the Cavendish Laboratory a concentration of energy corresponding to one million degrees centigrade had already been reached, and it might be possible to raise this one day to 40,000,000 degrees. It would then lie possible to obtain energy sufficient to maintain the sun and stars as long as was required. Human generations in years long distant might find it necessary to postpone the end of the world by generating their own atomic energy. The world could be rejuvenated by the production of atomic energy and its age extended, from millions to billions of years.