THIMBLEFUL OF ATOMS

Waipa Post, Volume 41, Issue 3186, 9 August 1930, Page 7

THIMBLEFUL OF ATOMS

POWERFUL ENOUGH TO DRIVE A GREAT LINER.

An atom is something that cannot be divided into smaller parts. There is no such thing- as half an atom in the same sense as there is half a nut. This sounds strange. We can at least think of cutting up a nut into smaller and smaller fragments as long as we please. We can also think of a drop of water being divided up into still smaller drops, however small was the one we began with (writes the Rev. Dr Bertram Lee Woolf in the Congregational Monthly).

And no bubble of air can be too small for us to imagine it half the size. But science tells us that eventually we should come to the atoms, and if we divided them up we should have something 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 ever filed off a piece of iron contained countleess millions of them.

It is one of the wonders of science ever to have proved their existence, and it is still more wonderful to have found out a great deal about the way they are built up and in which they act. No one could have done it before our time, because the discovery depended upon X-rays, radium, and so on—things themselves undiscovered within the last generation.

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

Now the simplest atom, that of hydrogen, is something like that boy's head with the ball flying swiftly round. But really in the 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 the string broke? But of course there is no string to the atom. The flying ball is kept from shooting off at a tangent by electric attraction acting in precisely the same way as the electricity in the machinery of a tramcar. On this account the balls are called electrons, and because the 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 we could see 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 o.toms. They could not explode like shells on the battlefield. But we may well ask what would happen if the pull-back of the protons were suddenly to cease. The explosion of a tupful of atoms would be something compared with which the explosion of the largest shell our navy possesses would be far more insignificant than a paper bag bust by a child.

Already we can use .the force of a common explosion in many ways. It is employed in blasting rock and also, of course, in the cylinders of every motor-car. But it is the dream of the scientist to make the atoms explode 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 ? _^_____