Page:Modern Views on Matter.djvu/31

 Rh breaking up; throwing away a small portion, say one per cent, of themselves, with immense violence, at about one-tenth of the speed of light; the remainder constituting a slightly different substance, which however is still extremely unstable, and therefore radio-active, going through its stages with much greater rapidity than the radium itself, because practically the whole of it is in the unstable condition, and so giving rise to fresh and fresh products of its own decay, till a comparatively stable state is reached, or till the process passes beyond our means of detection.

Roughly, the process may be likened in some respects to the condensation or contraction of a nebula. The particles constituting a whirling nebula fall together until the centrifugal force of the peripheral portions exceeds the gravitative pull of the central mass, and then they are shrunk off and left behind, afterwards agglomerating into a planet; while the residue goes on shrinking and evolving fresh bodies and generating heat. A nebula is not hot, but it has an immense store of potential energy, some of which it can turn into heat, and so form a hot central nucleus or sun. A radium atom is not hot, but it too has a great store of potential energy, immense in proportion to its mass, for it is controlled by electrical, not by gravitational forces; and just as the falling together of the solar materials generates heat, so that a shrinkage of a few yards per century can account for all its tremendous emission, so it has been calculated that the collapsing of the electrical constituents of a radium atom, by so little as one per cent, of their distance apart, can supply the whole