TIME OF ATOMIC PLANETS

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1781, 10 July 1926, Page 2

TIME OF ATOMIC PLANETS

MILLIONS OF YEARS TO A SECOND Nowadays we think in quite different dimensions than did the alchemists, says Dr. E. E. Free in the Forum (New York). For the moderate-sized universe which we feel and see, the convenient time units are the day and the year. Both are rotations; the rotation of the earth on its axis and its motion round the sun. Now it hapI pens that atoms rotate too, the particles inside them revolving round the common centre, much as the planets revolve round the sun. And if there were intelligent being inhabiting these atomic particles, as 'we inhabit the earth, they would be inclined, doubtless, to take the period of atomic rotation for their time-unit, exactly as we do The resultant time-scale would be ridiculously dissimilar to ours. It takes you about one-fifth of a second to snap your (fingers. In one earthly year you could snap your fingers, if your strength held out, some six hundred million times. But if the atomic year is taken as one revolution of the flying atomic planes round the centre of the atom, just as it is for the earth, then more than a million billions of these atomic years would elapse while you snapped your fing-« ers once. This, too, is for one of the slowest of the atoms. Some are more than a hundred times faster.

You remember the insects immortalised in the famous letter of Benjamin Franklin, insects which lived only for a day and' to whom it seemed that the broad green plane of the leaf on which they dwelt was eternal. Not one of them had ever seen it change. Now much more eternal and changeless would we seem to an atom! If an atom-dweller lived for the span of 70 atomic years which is traditional for us, he might live and die in the midst of an exploding mass of gunpowder and never know that his universe had altered in the least.

And just so, when we look at what seems to us the unchanging picture of the stars which form the greater universe whose time-unit is millions of times greater than our own, it is worth while to remember that what seems to us a span of 70 years may be, in reality, a mere instant while' some sort of celestial dynamite i s going off. It is true enough to say that the essence of the Einstein theory is merely the conclusion that everything depends on the point of view. It is equally true to say that everything depends on the length of the look.

These three (or perhaps more) universes which lie within each other and differ so astonishingly in sizescale and in time-scale, ai - e linked together by only one thing—energy. The energy that drives the machinery of our middle-size universe comes, let us say. from the heat of burning coal. But the heat of burning coal is derived, in reality, from the atomic universe. A great mass of carbon atoms lies for millions and millions of their years in what we call a lire. Every thousand years or so one of these atoms combines with an oxygen atom and gives off some heat. The heat comes out into our universe, and we use it. Thus the two universes, the atomic one and ours, are linked. But 'the energy of the coal came, in the beginning, from the sun. Plants grew, absorbed sunlight, died, and were fossilised. So, in reality, the simple act of burning coal under a boiler to run a factory involves a linkage between the great billion-year universe of the sun and stars, the familar one-year universe of ourselves, and the tiny, atomic-year universe of atoms. This pervasive linkage 'by means of energy is one thing that makes people believe that energy is actually the only thing in the universe that is real. All the others, stars and earths and atoms alike, may be, they think, as ephemeral as were Benjamin Franklin's insects and as unreal' as were these insects' ideas of the eternity of their leaf.