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Updated: September 17, 2025
Since the distribution of radio-active matter throughout the earth is so great, however, it is as yet impossible to determine whether this may not account for the radio-activity of all substances. As we have just seen, recent evidence seems to point to the cause of the disruption of radio-active atoms as lying in the atoms themselves.
The disintegration of an explosive, started by an external force, is generally completed in a fraction of a second; change of condition changes the rate of explosion: the "half-life period" of each radio-active substance is a constant characteristic of it; if a gram of radium were kept for about 1800 years, half of it would have changed into radio-inactive substances.
It is beside the question to point to the fact that in Nature 'new elements are making their appearance and old elements disappearing, for though we may speculate as to the manner of formation of uranium and thorium, and though the production of radio-active matters in Nature at the present time and always seems to be a well-established fact, such phenomena have not even an analogy with those of a living being, however humble."
It will be sufficient for the layman to know that my preserved phantoms, rendered radio-active, would, upon contact with the air, resume their spectral shape. The possible extension of my business now was enormous, limited only by the difficulty in collecting the necessary stock. It was by this time almost as difficult to get ghosts as it was to get radium.
She possessed no mediumistic properties of her own but was a staunch proponent of spiritualism, believing firmly in immortality and the omnipotence of "translated" souls. Professor Herold is most widely known as the inventor of certain apparatus connected with wireless. But he is also considered the West's most advanced student of electrical and radio-active subjects.
As the facts of radio-activity led to the conclusion that some of the minute particles of radio-active substances are constantly disintegrating, and as these substances had been labelled elements, it seemed probable, or at least possible, that the other bodies which chemists have long called elements are not true elements, but are merely more stable collocations of particles than the substances which are classed as compounds.
The peculiarity of the new kind of particles, the particles of radio-active bodies, is, not that they can be separated into unlike parts by the action of external forces, but that they are constantly separating of their own accord into unlike parts, and that their spontaneous disintegration is accompanied by the production of energy, the quantity of which is enormous in comparison with the minuteness of the material specks which are the carriers of it.
It is, on the contrary, very general, and ionisation is just as well produced by the cathode rays, by the radiations emitted by radio-active bodies, by the ultra-violet rays, by heating to a high temperature, by certain chemical actions, and finally by the impact of the ions already existing in neutral molecules.
"My friends," declared the little man of science pompously, "we have reason to believe that a wonderful discovery has been made, namely, Z.2.X." "Z.2.X., the most radio-active stuff in the world!" exclaimed Jack. "I suppose that approximately describes it," said the professor, "but what do you know about it?"
The answer to this is that, as Rutherford and Soddy have shown in the case of thorium, it is only an exceedingly small fraction of the mass which is at any one time radio-active, and that this radio-active portion loses its activity in a few hours, and has to be replaced by a fresh supply from the non-radio-active thorium."*11*
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