MME. CURIE’S NEW TASK.

Otago Witness, Issue 3112, 5 November 1913, Page 76

MME. CURIE’S NEW TASK.

A FORTUNE FOR THE FINDING. ' Mme. Curie, in spite of her absence, was the hero (for there is no sex in science) of the amazing debates which took place at the British Association meetings on radium, and its sister substances. Mme. Curie told me (writes the Manchester correspondent of the Daily Mail) that she was very unwilling for anything to be published about her' future work. One reason was that she had left behind an announcement with Professor Soddy, who was good enough to tell me what exactly was the task which Mine. Curie has hurried back to Paris to undertake. The work is the direct result of the Birmingham meeting. Mme. Curie has an immense admiration for the talent of Professor Rutherford, with whom she has held much discussion, and they agree on the main lines. She has a direct conflict of opinion with Professor Soddy, but it is the enemy in the scientific sense of the word who has, as it were, set Mme, Curie her new task.

Professor Soddy and Professor Rutherford are two of the most brilliant of our new schools respectively of chemists and physicists, and these two schools are on many points directly opposed. Mine. Curie’s most subtle eyes and hands and mind are to be employed on a work which can only be explained by describing the radium debate opened by Professor Soddy, who has made some remarkable advances during the last eight months. In describing this scientific advance, I incorporate some facts afterwards discussed with Sir ■ William Ramsay and others. Splitting the Elements.— “We begin to know at last,” said Professor Soddy, and this knowledge is of this nature: There are about a hundred types of matter or elements so-called. Mine. Curie and others discover that these are not by any means stable or unsplittable. There is in them radioactivity, as it is called. They give off power, warmth, and electricity, for example, and this means that they arc inwardly changing or breaking down. Radium is the most famous and important of these radio-active substances, because it is the only one that can be got in sufficient bulk and which lives long enough. Some liave a life of only a few minutes. The trouble is that no one can find any chemical difference between the part that is energetic and the part that is idle, and so the two cannot be separated. For instance, lead and radio-lead are quite inseparable in Professor Soddy’a opinion. Mme. Curie does not think so, and. at Professor Soddy’s suggestion, made, he tells me, some months ago, Mme. Curie is going to find out which is right. She is the proud possessor of a whole gramme—about 15£ grains—of radium, which is more than anyone else possesses, except the Austrian Government, and she means to find out, by moans of the spectroscope, that the two parts .are chemically different. It ia an example of the astonishing minuteness and precision of her work that she has recently found out that there was enough lead in the air comine from the painting on the walla and what not to spoil all her experiments. *-—Alchemy of To-day.— What radium has shown is the truth, in another form, of the long aince discredited belief of the old alchemists, who tried to transmute other metals into gold. We now know that the elements are actually transmuted. In Professor Soddy’e

words, “We know what to do but "riot how to do it.” If he had sufficient electric power of a certain sort he could at once transmute—that is, ho could control these radio-active changes. He could ge.t gold, and perhaps break up lead, which is at present the ultimate end—a most dead and stable thing, a real element. The immediate question is: Can Mme. Curie get a different spectrum for the radio-active part of thorium or lead? If she can, then, as a chemist said in his technical way, “ the fat’s in the fire.” Incidentally there is a vast fortune for any chemist who can separate these hitherto inseparable, though clearly different, things. In a. debate on kindred subjects by the physicists, Mr Aston gave proof of a new gas in the air, and Sir J. J. Thomson gave ihe results of some astonishingly ingenious methods of getting a possibly new product called X 3. Professor Soddy tells me that lie is hoping to get a grant from the association for getting radium. “If only we had enough material!” he sighed, with a most eloquent expiration.