ATOMIC DISINTEGRATION

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 32, 6 August 1921, Page 7

ATOMIC DISINTEGRATION

SIR ERNEST RUTHERFORD'S

DISCOVERY.

(rr.on our. own co-respondent.)

LONDON, 15th June. oir_ Ernest Rutherford has been explaining how actual disintegration of what has been looked upon as unalterable matter can be made to take placo. This was at a lecture before • the Physical Society in London. One of the* recent discoveries made by the. renowned physicist, is that by driving numbers of tho alpha particles (which are continually given off by radium), into a- gas such as hydrogen, one such alphaparticle in ten million or so will collide "dead on" with a hydrogen atom and send it forward with sue!.l a spurt that it will travel four times its normal distance. So great is tho energy contained in the atom that prodigious forces were at work, -he said, in those collisions.

Similar experiments carried out with nitrogen have led to a remarkable discovery—that by making alpha particles charge, into tho atoms and drive thorn forward, tlie, collisions break tip the structure of tho atom to some extent, and some of tho nitrogen is automatically set free as hydrogen. \ A partial transmitation—infinitely small at prosent—into hydrogen, lias been effected by making the alpha particles ohargs into atoms of fluorine. Bodiuni, aluminium, and phosphorus. Thus tho actual disintegration of what has been looked upon for centuries as unalterable matter has been effected by a man-controlled proc3ss, and elements of a certain 1 definite typo have been partially transmitted into the parent substance of all matter—hydrogen. ,