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Updated: June 11, 2025
Soddy makes the suggestive inquiry: "If life begins in a single cell, does intelligence? does the physical distinction between living and dead matter begin in the jostling molecular crowd? Inanimate molecules, in all their movements, obey the law of probability, the law which governs the successive falls of a true die.
But if we follow up this idea and declare that there are three kinds of force also, claiming this distinction for the third term of our proposition, we shall be running counter to the main current of recent biological science. "The idea that a peculiar 'vital force' acts in the chemistry of life," says Professor Soddy, "is extinct."
Sir W. Ramsay and Professor Soddy attained a like result by endeavouring to estimate the mass of the emanation by the quantity of helium produced. He also remarks on "the experimental difficulty of accurately determining the number of alpha particles expelled from radium per second."
In spite of uncertainties which are not yet entirely removed, it cannot be denied that many experiments render it probable that in radioactive bodies we find ourselves witnessing veritable transformations of matter. Professor Rutherford, Professor Soddy, and several other physicists, have come to regard these phenomena in the following way.
The theory "is a necessity to explain the experimental facts of chemical composition." "Through metaphysics first," says Soddy, "then through alchemy and chemistry, through physical and astronomical spectroscopy, lastly through radio-activity, science has slowly groped its way to the atom."
Soddy asks if the physical distinction between living and dead matter begins in the jostling molecular crowd begins by the crowd being directed and governed in a particular way. If so, by what? Ah! that is the question. Science will have none of it, because science would have to go outside of matter for such an agent, and that science cannot do.
The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as the year 1933.
Professors Rutherford and Soddy have described them clearly in the case of uranium and radium. As regards thorium the results are less satisfactory. The evolution should continue until a stable atomic condition is finally reached, which, because of this stability, is no longer radioactive. Thus, for instance, radium would finally be transformed into helium.
'Say you're sorry, sir, to Jane, for giving her so much extra trouble, commanded his father. 'I'm soddy, Jane, said the child, nodding to her; 'but it was a p wecious pie, wasn't it? The mixture of humour and candour in his baby eye was irresistible. Even Jane laughed, and David took him up and swung him on to his shoulder. 'Come out, young man, into the garden, where I can keep an eye on you.
I refer to atomic change, as in radio-activity, which gives us lead from helium a spontaneous change of the atoms. The energy that keeps the earth going, says Soddy, is to be sought for in the individual atoms; not in the great heaven-shaking voice of thunder, but in the still small voice of the atoms. Radio-activity is the mainspring of the universe.
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