THE JOURNEYING ATOMS 



hurled in terrible fiery phalanxes across the battle- 

 field of the storm. 



The physicist describes the atom and talks about 

 it as if it were "a tangible body which one could 

 hold in his hand like a baseball." "An atom," Sir 

 Oliver Lodge says, "consists of a globular mass of 

 positive electricity with minute negative electrons 

 embedded in it." He speaks of the spherical form 

 of the atom, and of its outer surface, of its centre, 

 and of its passing through other atoms, and of the 

 electrons that revolve around its centre as planets 

 around a sun. The electron, one hundred thousand 

 times smaller than an atom, yet has surface, and 

 that surface is a dimpled and corrugated sheet — 

 like the cover of a mattress. What a flight of the 

 scientific imagination is that! 



The disproportion between the size of an atom 

 and the size of an electron is vastly greater than 

 that between the sun and the earth. Represent an 

 atom, says Sir Oliver Lodge, by a church one hun- 

 dred and sixty feet long, eighty feet broad, and forty 

 feet high; the electrons are like gnats inside it. Yet 

 on the electric theory of matter, electrons are all of 

 the atom there is; there is no church, but only the 

 gnats rushing about. We know of nothing so empty 

 and hollow, so near a vacuum, as matter in this 

 conception of it. Indeed, in the new physics, mat- 

 ter is only a hole in the ether. Hence the newspaper 

 joke about the bank sliding down and leaving the 



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