86 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



weight of corpuscles contains energy equal to 

 80,000,000,000 horse-power per second. A 

 gramme of radium in a little more than a year 

 gives out enough heat to raise the temperature 

 of 900,000 grammes of water by 1° C. ; and 

 Professor R. K. Duncan declares that " the heat 

 evolved by the radium emanation is over three 

 million five hundred thousand times greater than 

 that let loose by any known chemical reaction." 

 And Whetham calculates that it may possibly be 

 ten million times greater. 



Measured by its electrical potency, the intra- 

 atomic energy is equally prodigious ; one gramme 

 of hydrogen contains an electric charge of 96,000 

 coulombs — enough to charge the whole surface of 

 the globe to a potential of 6000 volts, and Le Bon 

 computes that the best static machines would have 

 to work unceasingly " for a little over thirty years 

 to give the quantity of electricity contained within 

 the atoms of one gramme of hydrogen." 



Such concentration of energy is almost incred- 

 ible ; but energy is mainly a question of velocity : 

 a gramme or fifteen grains of matter, says Sir 

 William Crookes, moving with the speed of light, 

 would have energy enough to lift the British navy 

 to the top of Ben Nevis ; and, as Le Bon points 

 out, the head of a pin spinning with sufficient 

 speed might have a mechanical power equal to 



