Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
It is true that the discovery of radio-activity has disclosed a new source of energy within the atoms themselves, and there are scientific men, like Professor Arrhenius, who attach great importance to this source.
Fortunately, radio-activity can be detected and measured by electrical methods of extraordinary fineness, methods the delicacy of which very much more exceeds that of spectroscopic methods than the sensitiveness of these surpasses that of ordinary chemical analysis.
"That is so like men!" interrupted Morgana, with a laugh "They will think of steam power when they are actually in possession of electricity! and they will stick to electricity without moving the one step further which would give them the full use of radio-activity!
At the time of the discovery of radio-activity, about seventy-five substances were called elements; in other words, about seventy-five different substances were known to chemists, none of which had been separated into unlike parts, none of which had been made by the coalescence of unlike substances. Compounds of only two of these substances, uranium and thorium, are radio-active.
Still others have attempted to solve the problem by seeing how much salt the rivers are carrying into the sea, and consequently how long it must have taken the sea to become as salt as it is. A very late attempt has been based on the alteration in the minerals that show radio-activity.
Our practical life upon this planet is more or less a struggle with gross matter; our senses apprehend it coarsely; of its true inwardness they tell us nothing; of the perpetual change and transformation of energy going on in bodies about us they tell us nothing; of the wonders and potencies of matter as revealed in radio-activity, in the X-ray, in chemical affinity and polarity, they tell us nothing; of the all-pervasive ether, without which we could not see or live at all, they tell us nothing.
We are now confronted by the fascinating theory of Arrhenius of an infinite universe filled with vital spores, wafted about by radio-activity, and beginning their upward course of evolution wherever they find a kindly soil on which to rest.
The quantities of substances used in experiments on radio-activity are so small that they escape the ordinary methods of measurement, and are scarcely amenable to the ordinary processes of the chemical laboratory.
Radio-activity is a very remarkable phenomenon. So far as we know at present, radio-activity is not a property of the substances which form almost the whole of the rocks, the waters, and the atmosphere of the earth; it is not a property of the materials which constitute living organisms.
'You know, sir, I've a fancy it is hard to prove such things that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced radio-activity, the world would have smashed much as it did. Only instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking