Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/25

Rh products unexplained. Unless there is some unknown source of energy in the medium which the radioactive bodies are capable of absorbing, it is difficult to imagine whence the energy demanded by the external theory can be derived. It certainly can not be from the air itself, for radium gives out heat inside an ice calorimeter. It can not be any type of rays such as the radioactive bodies emit, for the radioactivity of radium, and consequently its heating effect is unaltered by hermetically sealing it in a vessel of lead several inches thick. The evidence, as a whole, is strongly against the theory that the energy is borrowed from external sources and, unless a number of improbable assumptions are made, such a theory is quite inadequate to explain the experimental facts. On the other hand, the disintegration theory, advanced by Rutherford and Soddy, not only offers a satisfactory explanation of the origin of the energy emitted by the radio-elements, but also accounts for the succession of radioactive bodies. On this theory, a definite, small proportion of the atoms of radioactive matter every second become unstable and break up with explosive violence. In most cases, the explosion is accompanied by the expulsion of an α particle; in a few cases by only a β particle, and in others by α and β particles together. On this view, there is at any time present in a radioactive body a proportion of the original matter which is unchanged and the products of the part which has undergone change. In the case of a slowly changing substance like radium, this point of view is in agreement with the observed fact that the spectrum of radium remains unchanged with its age.

The expulsion of an α or β particle, or both, from the atom leaves behind an atom which is lighter than before and which has different chemical and physical properties. This atom in turn becomes unstable and breaks up, and the process, once started, proceeds from stage to stage with a definite and measurable velocity in each case.

The energy radiated is, on this view, derived at the expense of the internal energy of the radio-atoms themselves. It does not contradict the principle of the conservation of energy, for the internal energy of the products of the changes, when the process of change has come to an end, is supposed to be diminished by the amount of energy emitted during the changes. This theory supposes that there is a great store of internal energy in the radio-atoms themselves. This is not in disagreement with the modern views of the electronic constitution of matter, which have been so ably developed by J. J. Thomson, Larmor and Lorentz. A simple calculation shows that the mere concentration of the electric charges, which on the electronic theory are supposed to be contained in an atom, implies a store of energy in the atom so enormous that, in comparison, the large evolution of energy from the radio-element is quite insignificant.