Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/305

Rh 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 material 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 of the energy of the observed radiation—large though that is—for something like 30,000 years.

15. It does not follow that the life of a piece of radium is as great as that; the data are uncertain at present, but there is absolutely no ground for the popular and gratuitous surmise that it emits energy without loss or waste of any kind, and that it is competent to go on for ever. The idea, at one time irresponsibly mooted, that it contradicted the principle of the conservation of energy, and was troubling physicists with the idea that they must overhaul their theories—a thing which they ought always to be delighted to do on good evidence—this idea was a gratuitous absurdity and never had the slightest foundation; but the notion that radium was perhaps able to draw upon some unknown source or store of energy, without itself suffering loss, was a possibility which has not yet wholly disappeared from some minds. Sir W. Crookes, for instance, suggested that it might somehow utilize the most quickly moving atoms of air, after the fashion of a Maxwell demon—a possibility that should always be borne in mind as a conceivable explanation of the power of some living organisms. It is much more reasonable to suppose, however, that radium and the other like substances are drawing upon their own stores of internal atomic energy, and thereby gradually disintegrating and falling into other, and ultimately into more stable, forms of matter.

Not that it is to be supposed that even these are finally and absolutely stable: these too are subject to radiation loss, and so must be liable to decay; but at a vastly slower rate, perhaps not more than a few hundred atoms changing and diffusing away each second—a process