WOULD DRIVE A LINER

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 35, 9 August 1930, Page 25

WOULD DRIVE A LINER

GIANT POWER IN PINCH OF ATOMS

An atom is something that cannot be~ divided into .-,> smaller parts. There is no such; tiling as half an atom in the sanje'-gen'se as there is half a nut. This sounds' strange. We can at least think ofc-cutting' up a nut into smaller and sixfallor fragments as long'as wo please. WVcan also think of a drop of .water being divided up into still smaller drops, however small was the one we began with (writes tho Rev. Dr. Bertram Leo Woolf in the "Congrega-, tional Monthly").

No bubblo of air can be too small for us to imagine it half tho size. But science telJs us that eventually we should come to tlio atoms, and if wo divided them up wo should have something entirely different in the bits. It would not be even two bits of some sort of substance, but electricity, which is energy or force. In a pinhead there are millions of atoms. A single pint of them would pepper the whole land surface of the earth. Atoms are thus far too small for the microscope ever to see. The tiniest speck over filed off a pieco of iron contained countless millions of them. ;

Imagine a schoolboy with a golf ball on a long string. Ho begins to swing it round his head. Faster and faster it goes. Eventually he makes it swirl so rapidly that it seems to bo a ring round his head. It is then going round ten or twelve times a second.

ISfow the simplest atom, that of hydrogen, is something like that boy's head with the ball flying swiftly round. But really in tho atom the ball goes round the central core not merely ten or twelve times, but actually millions upon millions of times a second. "What would

happen if tho string broke? But, of course, there is no string in the atom. The flying ball is kept from shooting off at a tangent by electric attraction acting in precisely tho sameway as the electricity in the machinery of a tramdar. On this account the balls aro called electrons, and becauso tho cores must be there first, they are called protons.

All atoms except those of hydrogen possess.more than one electron flying round the proton. Indeed, the most complex have more than 200. And if wo could sco the electrons circling swiftly within atoms we should find that.no two are following precisely the same path even in the most complex atoms. They are at varying distances from the proton, some swinging round in ellipses much the same as if the string were made of india rubber, which stretched out and pulled in once every circuit. And each electron keeps strictly to its own orbit.

Of course, there is nothing like dynamite in atoms. They could not explode like shells on the battlefield. But we may well'ask what would happen if the 'pull-back of the protons we're suddenly to cease. The expjosion of a cupful; of atoms .would be something compared with which the explosion of the largest shell our Navy possesses would'be far inoro insignificant than a paper bag burst by a child.

But it is the dream of the scientist to make tho atoms explodo and use that force to work machinery. There is enough power locked in a thimbleful of atoms to drive a" great liner many times across the Atlantic. Can we get at that force? Not yet; nor perhaps in. our lifetime.