"PACE THAT KILLS"

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 124, 28 May 1928, Page 8

"PACE THAT KILLS"

♦ • GOLD FROM BASE METALS A THEORY EXPLODED (From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 21st March. Sir Ernest Rutherford, in a lecture at the Royal Institution on "The Transformation of Matter," said that it was well known that minute traces of gold were to be found in many substances, and, where gold was said to have be^n produced from base metals, the gold was no doubt : tliere all the time. In the last few years the Press had been full of claims by people that they .could change mercury or lead into gold or some other metal. The first case was the conversion of mercury into gold by the passage of electric current through an ordinary mercury vapour. This claim had been made within recent years by German and Japanese scientists, and much about this mir-' acle had appeared in the newspapers. Actually, the minute amounts of gold thus "transmuted" were present to begin with either in the mercury or the electrodes, for when other experimenters had carried out precisely the same experiment after having first taken the precaution of removing all foreign substances from the materials used, not a trace of gold was produced. . . ' • The theory of the permanency and indestructibility o£ the atom was, until the end of last century, the foundation of chemical and physical science. Then came the sensational discovery of radium and other radio-active substances, which had revohitionised all ideas of the atom and the structure of matter. The study of the transformations which occurred in these radio-active bodies was one of the most fascinating branches of science. Before one's eyes these substances could be seen transforming themselves into other substances by ejecting alpha, beta, and gamma particles from their atoms. Up to the present, methods of transmuting metals on any large scale were not proved. At the same time they could not say that it might not become possible on a small scale to produce those effects. ALCHEMY OLD AND NEW. "Since the discovery of radium," says the "Daily Telegraph," in a leading article on "Alchemy Old and New," "physics and chemistry have had to adjust their principles to the fact that elements are not immutable nor atoms permanent. We know of more than thirty elemental substances which are continually changing themselves into something quite different. If Nature is continually transforming uranium into radium and radium into lead, why should chemists not succeed, as aou\e of them claim to have done, in producing gold from mercury? Sir Ernest Rutherford does not belieye that the thing has been done yet, for .none of the processes can be repeated. at will. • . "It is an odd thing that some of the old alchemists thought mercury was the basis of all elements, and others that' it was a necessary part of the philosopher's stone which would make everything into gold. What attracts the modern investigator is the closeness of the ■atomic numbers for mercury is SO, gold 79. It may be possible some day to turn one into the other on a minute scale. But Sir Ernest Rutherford sees no future of mass production. Perhaps it is as well. The economic difficulty of floods of gold might be evaded. But what should we do in a disintegrating world? We are warned by a picture of the long cycle of evolution, for winch millions of years were appointed, rushing to completion in a few centuries. This, indeed, is the pace that kills."