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Molecules of matter outside the living body all obey the law of probability, or the law of chance; but inside the living body they at least seem to obey some other law the law of design, or of dice that are loaded, as Soddy says. They are more likely always to act in a particular way. Life supplies a directing agency.
Speaking of the discovery of radium, Professor Soddy writes: "Tracked to earth the clew to a great secret for which a thousand telescopes might have swept the sky forever and in vain, lay in a scrap of matter, dowered with something of the same inexhaustible radiance that hitherto has been the sole prerogative of the distant stars and sun."
Soddy asks whether or not the minute cells of the body may not have the power of taking advantage of the difference in temperature of the molecules bombarding them, and thus of utilizing energy that is beyond the capacity of the machinery of the motor-car.
Soddy, in making some experiments with radium, saw produced, apparently from radium emanations, another quite different and distinct substance, the element helium. The report of such a revolutionary phenomenon was naturally made with scientific caution.
In other words, he's shown that the breakdown of the atoms of radium and the other radioactive elements isn't spontaneous, as Soddy and others had thought, but is due to the action of certain extremely penetrating rays given out by the sun.
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*
Asher's face was bright with anticipation. "You are a dreamer, Aydelot." "No, Jim Shirley's a dreamer," Asher insisted. "Mrs. Aydelot and I planned our home the first night she came a bride to our little one-roomed soddy.
In the same way, Professors Rutherford and Soddy have discovered a so-called thorium X to be the stage through which ordinary thorium has to pass in order to produce its emanation. Since the above was written, another product has been found to intervene between the X substance and the emanation in the case of actinium and thorium. They have been named radio-actinium and radio-thorium respectively.
They are the fountain-head of the immense stores of the inter-atomic energy, which, if it could be tapped and controlled, would so easily do all the work of the world. But this we cannot do. "We are no more competent," says Professor Soddy, "to make use of these supplies of atomic energy than a savage, ignorant of how to kindle a fire, could make use of a steam-engine."
This claim even then jeered at by the world at large had to wait shivering in the cold another nine years, before Mr Frederic Soddy clothed it in respectable scientific garb by speaking publicly of the possibilities in the future connected with atomic disintegration and consequent liberation of energy.
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