The Outline of Science, Volume 1

What the discovery of radium implied was only gradually realised. Radium captivated the imagination of the world; it was a boon to medicine, but to the man of science it was at first a most puzzling and most attractive phenomenon. It was felt that some great secret of nature was dimly unveiled in its wonderful manifestations, and there now concentrated upon it as gifted a body of men—conspicuous amongst them Sir J. J. Thomson, Sir Ernest Rutherford, Sir W. Ramsay, and Professor Soddy—as any age could boast, with an apparatus of research as far beyond that of any other age as the Aquitania is beyond a Roman galley. Within five years the secret was fairly mastered. Not only were all kinds of matter reduced to a common basis, but the forces of the universe were brought into a unity and understood as they had never been understood before. ELECTRIC DISCHARGE IN A VACUUM TUBE The two ends, marked + and -, of a tube from which nearly all air has been exhausted are connected to electric terminals, thus producing an electric discharge in the vacuum tube. This discharge travels straight along the tube, as in the upper diagram. When a magnetic field is applied, however, the rays are deflected, as shown in the lower diagram. The similarity of the behaviour of the electric discharge with the radium rays (see diagram of deflection of radium rays, post) shows that the two phenomena may be identified. It was by this means that the characteristics of electrons were first discovered. THE RELATIVE SIZES OF ATOMS AND ELECTRONS An atom is far too small to be seen. In a bubble of hydrogen gas no larger than the letter "O" there are billions of atoms, whilst an electron is more than a thousand times smaller than the smallest atom. How their size is ascertained is described in the text. In this diagram a bubble of gas is magnified to the size of the world. Adopting this scale, each atom in the bubble would then be as large as a tennis ball. IF AN ATOM WERE MAGNIFIED TO THE SIZE OF ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, EACH ELECTRON IN THE ATOM (AS REPRESENTED BY THE CATHEDRAL) WOULD THEN BE ABOUT THE SIZE OF A SMALL BULLET ELECTRONS STREAMING FROM THE SUN TO THE EARTH There are strong reasons for supposing that sun-spots are huge electronic cyclones. The sun is constantly pouring out vast streams of electrons into space. Many of these streams encounter the earth, giving rise to various electrical phenomena. [Pg 259]