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Updated: May 14, 2025
In the light of what is now known about radio-activity, it is necessary to suppose that some of the minute particles of uranium emit particles lighter than themselves, and change into some substance, or substances, different from uranium; in other words, it is necessary to suppose that some particles of uranium are spontaneously disintegrating.
"It is quite simple, being nothing more than a radium generator diffusing radio-activity in all directions to a distance of a hundred yards or so from the flier.
The work of many investigators has made the old paths clearer, and has shown to chemists and physicists ways they had not seen before, by forcing them to think of, and to make use of, a third kind of material particles that are endowed with the extraordinary property of radio-activity.
What then are we to make of a remark like the following, made by Professor J. J. Thomson, perhaps only half-seriously, to the British Association at Cambridge, in 1904? "There was one law," he said, "which he felt convinced nobody who had worked on this question" the radio-activity of matter "would ever suggest, and that was the constancy of Nature."
This is not theory, it is fact clearly demonstrated to us by the study of Radio-activity. Curiously enough, we know more about these bodies than we do of the atom itself; we actually know their size and weight and the speed with which they move.
The radio-activity of salts of uranium was proved not to be increased or diminished when these salts had been shielded for five years from the action of light by keeping them in leaden boxes. Shortly after Becquerel's discovery, experiments proved that salts of the rare metal thorium are radio-active.
When a solution of a radium salt is placed in a closed vessel the radio-activity in part leaves the solution and distributes itself through the vessel, the sides of which become radio-active and luminous.
The structures of animal and vegetable life are of comparatively recent formation, and are still apparently progressing in the direction of complexity, whereas the structures of matter appear to have long passed the stage of highest complexity, and the elements are now undergoing the retrograde process of being transformed, by radio-activity, from the more complex into simpler elements of lower atomic denominations namely, having fewer bricks in each atom.
Investigations which followed into radio-activity led the Cambridge professors, Larmor and Thomson, to conclude that electricity existed in small particles, which were called "electrons." These seem to be the ingredients of which atoms are made. A molecule is composed of two or more atoms. That of hydrogen, for example, has two; that of water three; and so on up to a thousand or more.
Whenever chemists have thought of elements as the ultimate kinds of matter with which the physical world is constructed and they have occasionally so thought and written they have fallen into quagmires of confusion. Of course, the elements may, some day, be separated into unlike parts. The facts of radio-activity certainly suggest some kind of inorganic evolution.
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