The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-05-09

If this be true and all observations thus far made warrant the belief that | it is, the axiom of physics that all en- ergy is but the mechanical equivalent of energy previously exerted to produce | it, and that all work is but credit tC balance a debit previously recorded l would seem to need revision. The lat ter experiments of Becquerel, and of M and Mime. Curie, with uranium and the last addition to the group of elements 1 found in association with it, radium, give us phenomena which in their rela- l tion to other phenomena so universal
 as to warrant the formulation of laws | which have thus far not only passed | unchanbed, but have satisfactorily ac- | counted for pretty much everything dy- | namical, may very we'll pass to classi- fication as miraculous. The fact that
 they are not miracles, but are manifes- ted in obedience to a we'll established
 natural law of invariable operation; has caused the physics to look at one anoth- CT and ask if it can be true that modern
 science has builded upon a corner stone which has crumbled under it.
 The assumption that the Becquerel rays, which in certain new clements of which radium is the most active of those thus far known. are not streams
 of material particles forever flowing
 from their source without diminution or
 change, but mere vibrations of ether, like the Hertzian rays employed in
 wireless telegraphy would have saved
 a great real of trouble, but unfortu- nately this was rendered untenable by the discovery that if such stream of radiant energy was allowed to fall upon
 an electrified badly it would discharge it
 precisely as jet of tangible water would do. And now Crookes has made
 these rays visible, and Professor Lipp- mann has established the fact to the satisfaction of the French Academic Sciences that radium is capable of pro- ducing sensible heat ad infinitum, with out consuming itself or anything else so far as can be determined.
 Whether these discoveries have any economic value or not Is of less imme- diate concern than the effect they will have on science. A century ago they would have been regarded as establish ing the hypothesis of phlogiston as a property of certain kinds of matter and we should be compelled to regard radi- un as the most highly prlogisticated of known substances. Probably we can do better, however, than to go back to that particular starting point for new de- parture. Meanwhile two questions of great interest will probably occupy the physicists for some time to come. One is, what property of matter permits any form of 1t to maintain a practically eternal energy in expelling stream of fragments of its own mass? The other is, what is the form of matter this pro- jected? It has been assumed with some show of plausibility, as the result of calculations from the imperfect data now available that the radiation of ra- dium would in about ten thousand mill lions of years deduce the mass about one grain in weight for each square inch of surface. Obviously it cannot be projecting the atoms of the Dalton hy- pothesis. These units of the molecular groupings, however small, would ex- haust it at much more rapid rate than that assumed in the case of radium. The form of matter expelled must be infinite sub divisions of the mathemat- ical unit called the atom; perhaps the primordial matter of the alchemists. The narrow door thus placed invitingly ajar may lead to truths of which the students of the middle ages had clear
 CT perception than those of modern times, who know more and dream less. and whose imaginations are hampered by the desire to prove all things. It may be we shall be no happier and no better off when we know why radium behaves in a fashion so extraordinary; but the world is full of wise men who cannot rest until they do know, and it
 nay very we'll happen to them,. as it
 has to others, that in searching for the end of the rainbow they will find great many things they were not spe- cially looking for which the of immedi- ate and immeasurable utility. That we could not usefully employ radium if we had it in masses is probably due to rea- sons which have discouraged the search for the universal solvent-~we have nothing to keep it in.-Iron Age.