The Washington times., 1920-02-08

Two New Worlds.
You Are Made Of EIectrons.
Twenty-Five TriIlions In All.
Other Big Figures.
By ARTHUR BRISBANE.
lCaovHshf ISxOl

Dy hRlhOn bUloDhNI-
tcopyrsht. isso)
''For the Glory Of God and the
Honor Of Ireland" Mr.. e. E. Four
nier d'Albe wrote ten or eleven
years ago book called 1.-TWO New
Worlds." This book, by a real
scientist, whose other book. "The
Electron Theory" intelligent men
should read, deals with the inf
nitely big and Infinitely small. II
supports with scientific fact the
supposed existence of an "infra"
and supra" universe.
That "infra" world compared
with ours would be like single
atom, with its electrons revolving
around it, compared to our solar
system, sun and planets. And in
the supra" world of infinite big
ness our sun, one million times as
big as this earth, gigantic Jupiter
and all the other planets in our
little system would SEEM as small
as an atom, a thing invisible even
in the most powerful microscope.
Fournier d'Albe's 1.-TWO New
Worlds" is not recommended to all
readers, but let the one in hun
dred get 1t. The ninety-nine others
would SOY "It gives me q head
ache, with its mathematical SYM
bols," or IF the invisible atom is
another universe with its central
sun and revolving planets, and if
there exists (supra) universe in
which our sun, this earth and all
the planets are only an atom, life
is too complicated. / don't want
to live in universe infinitely big
and infinitely little"
Yet If you lived on a planet in
f1nitely small, or infinitely big. you
would not know the difference;
slime and space are, After all,
purely relative. II at midnight to.
night, all things, including our.
selves and our measuring instru.
ments, were reduced In size one
thousand times, we should be left
quite unaware Of any such change"
The same thing would hold good
In Fournier d'Albe's infra world
upon which you would be si.e
twenty-second power Of ten times
smaller than you are now. To find
what ten at the twenty-second
power amounts to, write ten on a
piece OF paper and add twenty-,ne
zeros.
The man who has mental energy
to spare for the details of Fournier
d'Albe's charmingly written, in
tensely interesting hundred and
fifty pages will order the bopk
Two New Worlds" published by
Longmans, Green & Co.
The ninety-nine others inter-
ested in the ,,recent-talk about the
power locked up in an atom may be
interested in peptonized extracts
from Two New Worlds" :"
A drop OF water hanging on the
end of q leaf "may contain thou
sands Of small animals which eat,
and fight, and. love, and die, and
whose span Of life, to Judge from
their intense activity, is probably
filled with as many events as our
own" Boil that drop and all the
life ends.
The smallest living objects con-
tain disease germs, for instance,
man never sees, even with the
most powerful microscope. You
can now see things as small as
one-fifty-thousandth part of an
inch in diameter, but that is, mi.
croscopically speaking, compare
lively large. The best we can
ever hope to do, according to the
expert Albe, is to see thing
as small as the one hundred and
forty-six-thousandth part Of an
inch.
We "see" things in the micro
scope because they interfere with
the light coming to our eye, as
you see your hand when you hold
it between your eyes and the
window,
Below diameter of a one hun.
dred and forty-sixth thousandth
part of an inch eight bends
around the object and enters the
eye. Just as if the object did not
exist"
Therefore we can never see an
atom, although Siedentop and
Szigmondy, German scientists,
have CONSTRUCTED a microscope on
the principle of lateral illumina-
ton" making it possible to per-
ceive objects one millionth of an
inch in diameter. But "perceiv-
ing" is not really seeing.
The appalling smallness of
things all around you is made
dreadfully emphatic when you are
told that living organisms are in
visible to the microscope, yet mo
living organism contains less than
a hundred million molecules" The
molecule consists Of two atoms,
"linked together by electro-static
force" and each of these atoms
has revolving around it perpet-
ually with terrific speed, approach
ing the speed of ligIt, it's family
of electrons; in some cases hun
dreds Of them revolve around a
Gin olo ato,,, c. that tba en-, ,,llo.t