MAIL NEWS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIV, Issue 166, 14 July 1903, Page 5

MAIL NEWS.

A SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

SOME OPINIONS ON RADIUM.

A cable to the New York "Sun" from London of June 20th says:- 'he w-orid's foremost searchers after the ultimate secrets of the universe have at length committed themselves to a theory which has been long foreshadowed, and now is apparently substantiated by the study of the newly discovered substance called radium. Professor Crookes, recently in Berlin, and Professors Lodge and Curie, this week in London, have confidently proclaimed that it is easy to define this great revolution of science in scarcely more than a sentence. To comprehend it, however, is almost as far beyond the power of human mind as the idea of eternity or infinite space.

The old theory that atoms of elements consist of indivisible units of matter has been dehnitely discarded. Instead it appears that each atom is a whole stellar system of infinitely smaller but absolutely identical units, all in orbital motion. The hydrogen atom consists of seven hundred such atoms or ions. The nature or identity of each substance depends upon the number of such ions contained in each atom; thus eleven thousand two hundred ions in each atom produces what is known as oxygen, and one hundred and thirtyseven thousand two hundred of the same ions, if combined in a single atom, would yield gold.

The nature of these ions is, for lack of a better world, electrical. In other words, electricity and matter are one and the same thing. Professor Lodge and associates believe that matter is not stable in its atoms, as was heretofore supposed. Thus, water may be separated into oxygen and hydrogen, but it was never before supposed that atoms themselves were capable of disintegration. Professor Curie, in experiments last night at the Royal Institution, showed that radium spontaneously and continually disengaged heat, and gave off emanations similar to itself in constant and even violent streams or radiations. Lodge surmises that the process of disintegration oi atoms may constitute the evolution of chemical elements. The whole theory is, in fact, an astronomical one. Chemistry has, in fact, become astronomy of the infinitesimal. The world is clearly on the verge of the greatest revelation science has yet revealed.

American scientists have been following up English Professors in the study of radium, finding it present in water in America. Developments suggest the practical value of radio activity, and it is stated as already certain that radio activity will take tlie place of X-rays in photography. A force that never wastes and always produces is in effect perpclual motion, and steam and electricity both will be distanced if the new force can be put to the practical uses of the commercial world, which none who have witnessed the experiments already conducted can doubt will eventually be accomplished.