MERCURY IS CHANGED TO GOLD

Thames Star, Volume LIX, Issue 16798, 28 May 1926, Page 2

MERCURY IS CHANGED TO GOLD

GERMAN CLAIMS ARE NOT SWALLOWED. The recent claims by German and Japanese physicists that they have been able to transmute mercury into gold by means of powerful electric discharges are considered as highly improbable by Dr. F. W. Aston, F.R.S., the famous British Nobel Prize winner. “Experimental results have been obtained by several investigators in different parts of the world,” said Dr. Aston in his recent presidential address to the Rontgcn Society, “and the quantities of gold produced are remarkably large—large enough to dissipate the hope, so confidently 7 expiessed, that it is formed by transmutation of the mercury atoms owing to tile addition of an electron to their nuclei. This claim was supported, by a well-known authoritv* on the ground that since the nucleus is positively charged it would be quite easy to fire an electron into it. We know that a planet directed towards the sun would actually fall into it, but if every time, an electron was directed towards a nucleus it fell into it and was absorbed, how could matter have a permanent existence at all? “We know there must be some mechanism in Nature which prevents such a collapse taking place in this simple manner. Even if we grant the theoretical possibility, there are still fatal practical objections. No transmutation of the kind claimed could produce the gold found. This is ordinary gold which must have been present from the start. “Unless our views on the structure of nuclei are very wide of the mark, failure in such experiments is inevitable ,for the forces employed are ludicrously inadequate to cause disruption. Just as the dimensions of the nucleus are almost inconceivably small, so the forces binding together its component parts are gigantic, and to be measured in millions of volts. Such forces are not yet available in the laboratory.” At the conclusion of his address, Dr. Aston made some striking observations on atomic energy. “If we could transmute hydrogen into helium,” he declared, “we should produce energy in quantities which, for any sensible amount of matter, are prodigious beyond the dreams of scientific fiction.” He calculated that for one gramme atom of hydrogen—i.e., that quantity in a third of over a quarter of a million horse-power hours. “In a tumbler of water,” he added, by way of illustration, “lies enough power to drive the Mauretania across the Atlantic and back at full speed.” “Here we have at last a supply sufficient even for the demands of astronomers; indeed, there is now little doubt that the vast supply of energy radiated by the stars can be kept up for centuries by the loss of an insignificant fraction of their mass. Whether this process is a degradation of hydrogen I into helium or a complete annihilation of matter by coalescence of its protons and electrons is at present unknown. How long it will be before man is able to effect transmutation of matter into ’energy, and to what uses he will nut such vast potentialities, are interesting subjects for debate. If scientific knowledge maintains its present rate of progress, the balance of probability is in favour of ultimate success, but this appears so far off that almost any speculation may be permitted. It may be that the operation once started is uncontrollable, and that the new stars which flare out from time to time in the heavens are but an intimation broadcast to the universe of the first successful large-scale experiment on a far-distant- world.”

“It may be that the highest form of life on onr planet will one clay discover supreme material power or cataclysmic annihilation, in the same ocean wherein. we are told, its lowest forms originally evolved.”