NEW CONCEPTIONS OF THE UNIVERSE AND OF MATTER 



By Gabriel Louis-Jaray 



The principles of physics appear to have been entirely reconstructed 

 since the beginning of the twentieth century; because of experiments 

 made during the past 30 years, new ideas prevail in this science; 

 man is endeavoring to explain the universe, the atom, matter, light 

 according to conceptions essentially different from those of the nine- 

 teenth century. 



Louis de Broglie asserts that the introduction into physics in 1900 

 of the observations of Planck marks "one of the most important 

 moments in the evolution of contemporaneous science." 2 In pro- 

 moting that evolution a great number of French scholars have labored 

 and the "Palace of Discovery" exhibits some of their researches. 



The efforts of physicists have been directed especially toward the 

 study of the infinitely small and of the infinitely large: Astrophysi- 

 cists have pushed their stellar observations to extraordinary distances 

 and atomic physics has succeeded in revealing the orbit of an element 

 of matter of which 10 million could be placed end to end in a milli- 

 meter. In one case as in the other, these studies require the use of 

 a laboratory equipment that can only be attained with an infinite 

 amount of care, time, and money. This is one of the reasons which 

 explain why so many years were needed to bring out the new dis- 

 coveries, a glimpse of which we will try to present. 



The older physics was founded upon the existence of simple ele- 

 ments, not transmutable, of which today there are 92. Alchemy and 

 the older physics had failed in the search for unity in matter. 



The new physics considers that matter is composed of atoms all 

 formed essentially of two parts: A nucleus, called a proton, around 

 which revolves one or several corpuscles called electrons; the most 

 simple element is hydrogen, of which the nucleus is formed of a single 

 proton, around which a single electron revolves; by changing the 

 number and the arrangement of these two elements of the atom we 

 obtain the 92 simple elements. Efforts to transmute artificially 

 from one element to another have succeeded. Thus the new physics 

 is founded upon a real unity of matter. 



• Translated by permission from Mercure de France, vol. 283, No. 956, April 15, 1938. 



• Louis de Broglie: Matiere et lumiere, Paris, Albin Michel, p. 278, 1937. 



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