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He handed the exposed film to Vidac. "This film was protected by lead sheeting. It would take a deposit of pitchblende richer than anything I've ever heard of to penetrate the lead. But look at it! The film is completely exposed. The only thing that could do that is a deposit of uranium at least seventy-five per cent pure!" Vidac studied the films closely.
Thus we reach the conception of the universe as that of a great clock gradually running down, which is certainly the antithesis of that picture so long held before us by the advocates of the development theory. Uranium is a rather rare element, though known for over a hundred years, and has an atomic weight of 238.5.
The rays that get out strike the uranium plate and cause the surface layer of molecules to disintegrate, their products being driven off by the atomic explosions with a velocity about equal to that of light, and it's the recoil that deflects and swings the plate.
"And in this case, powdered carnotite was used in the fields, and chunks were put in the mine, to make victims think uranium was present," Rick added. He could see the picture pretty clearly now. "The carnotite was put in and then the field was planted with corn to make it look as innocent and natural as possible, I suppose." "That's how I figure it.
Turning the picnic area into a forbidding place, a haunted ground, would give the ghost and friends ample opportunity to roam the upper and lower fields without interference. Only, why roam the fields? Somehow, the radioactive dust in the cement bags must tie into it, but Rick couldn't imagine the connection. He thought of a secret uranium strike and rejected it.
But this radioactivity hardly attains the ten-thousandth part of that presented by uranium, or the ten-millionth of that appertaining to radium. Two other bodies, polonium and actinium, the one characterised by the special nature of the radiations it emits and the other by a particular spectrum, seem likewise to exist in pitchblende.
If the elements are considered in the order of increasing atomic weights, from hydrogen, whose atomic weight is taken as unity because it is the lightest substance known, to uranium, an atom of which is 240 times heavier than an atom of hydrogen, it is found that the elements fall into periods, and the properties of those in one period vary from element to element, in a way which is, broadly and on the whole, like the variation of the properties of those in other periods.
Loring motioned to them to sit down at a table. He ordered a bottle of rocket juice and filled three glasses. "This ain't uranium, Mr. Shinny!" he said. Shinny's eyes opened wider still. "What then?" "What's the most precious metal in the system today?" Loring asked. "Why gold, I guess." "Next to gold?" Shinny thought for a moment.
He estimated that nature had stored more uranium in but one of the abutments of this cliff than in all the known mines of the entire world. This radioactive mountain was the fulcrum by which this modern Archimedes had moved the earth.
It is remarkable that we owe the discovery of this wonderful element to a woman, Mme. Sklodowska Curie, the wife of a French professor and physicist. Mme. Curie began her work in 1897 with a systematic study of several minerals containing uranium and thorium and soon discovered the remarkable fact that there was some agent present more strongly radio-active than the metal uranium itself.
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