"AT ANY MOMENT."

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VII, Issue 2030, 17 August 1920, Page 11

"AT ANY MOMENT."

REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE. At any moment in some quiet laboratory may be revealca' a secret of nature which will transform all the conditions of man's being, and so visibly divide past from future that later generations may say: "At this point human .history was bisected and our day began, writes- Harold F. Wyatt, a British scientist in a contemporary. While this prodigious potentiality, is known to exist in matter, no effort to form some general,conception of the results expected appears to have yet been made.

Yet, these results beggar imagination and transcend experience. Coal fields and oil wells will become superfluities, and® all conditions of transport will be revolutionised. A motive power—enormous, illimitable and costing nothing save for such apparatus as may be required—will be placed at the service of an astonished world. The chosen mode of movement will be made through the air, and there ' speeds will naturally be reached exceeding any present thought of possibility, and the practical limitation will be marked only by the point at which swiftness of movement causes combustion. This raises the question: "Will man ever be able himself to navigate, while still wearing the vesture or flesh, the gulfs intervening between the units of the solar system?" The reply is that when atomic energy is at ]ast made usable there would seem to be no valid reason to reject the thought. Taking the moon's distance as averaging, roughly, 210,000 miles, the passage thither at a speed, say, of one mile per second—and we cannot imagine that under such conditions it could be less—would not be more than 60 hours. Again taking roughly the distance of Mars from us as averaging 30,000,000 miles, the time needed tocross that distance at the speed named would be a little under one year—about as long as the period consumed by Clive in his first visit to India.