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What a flight of the scientific imagination is that! The disproportion between the size of an atom and the size of an electron is vastly greater than that between the sun and the earth. Represent an atom, says Sir Oliver Lodge, by a church one hundred and sixty feet long, eighty feet broad, and forty feet high; the electrons are like gnats inside it.
But now the facts and principles brought to light in connection with the studies of radioactivity have settled it that we actually do have a much smaller unit than the hydrogen atom, one of only about 1/1760 its mass, in fact; and that this smallest of the small things of nature is none other than a particle of negative electricity, now called an electron.
This conception of a charge acting at a distance is a wholly artificial one. The conception which most fully expresses the character of nature is that of each event as modified by the ingression of each electron into nature. The ether is the expression of this systematic modification of events throughout space and throughout time.
Now, as a human fiend, he was installed in a luxury cabin of the finest ship of the fleet, with constant spin to give a feeling of weight and more room than the entire tube crew had known. He roamed the cabin until he found a little collapsible table. He set the electron microscope up on that and plugged it in. It seemed a shame that good equipment should be wasted along with his life.
And thanks to the absolute stability of artificial matter, we can handle such a condition. "The thing we are interested in is this: Artificial matter has no tendency to radiate, its electrons have no tendency to fall into the proton, for the matter is created, and remains as it was created. But natural matter does have a tendency to let the electron fall into the proton.
The sailors who stole Eumaeus from Ortygia, and carried him across the sea to Ithica, obtained their prize by coming to his father's palace, and bringing with them, among other wares, . . . a necklace of fine gold to sell, With bright electron linked right wondrously and well.
These movements are equivalent to tiny currents, and the mobile electron, when animated with a considerable velocity, must be sensitive to the action of the magnet which modifies the form of the trajectory and the value of the period.
Some of the experts conceive the electron as a minute whirlpool or vortex in the ocean of ether; some hold that it is a centre of strain in ether; some regard ether as a densely packed mass of infinitely small grains, and think that the positive and negative corpuscles, as they seem to us, are tiny areas in which the granules are unequally distributed. Each theory has its difficulties.
"Why is it, Morey, that an electron falls through the different quantum energy levels, falls successively lower and lower till it reaches its 'lowest energy level, and can radiate no more. Why can't it fill another step, and reach the proton? Why has it no more quanta to release? We know that electrons tend to fall always to lower energy level orbits. Why do they stop?"
The examples which I have given of the ingression of objects into events remind us that ingression takes a peculiar form in the case of some events; in a sense, it is a more concentrated form. For example, the electron has a certain position in space and a certain shape. Perhaps it is an extremely small sphere in a certain test-tube.
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