57o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The Disintegration oe Matter 



One of the latest developments of the theory of the disintegration of 

 matter is a suspicion, which scientists hardly dare to voice, that there is 

 a continual disintegration of all matter, stability being only relative 

 and the new and perfectly inactive gases discovered in the atmosphere 

 being among the most stable elements. It is just as natural for the 

 atom to die as for it to be born ; if we accept the latter, we can not deny 

 the former. The atom of matter slowly expends its energy as does a 

 watch-spring in doing the work of keeping time. Matter, according 

 to this theory, is concentrated energy, the dissipation of which is almost 

 too slow for us to detect. This theory has been taken advantage of to 

 try to explain the sun's effulgent shell, and the question arises: when 

 the unstable matter of the sun has completely disintegrated, will it 

 become a globe like ours, dark and relatively cold, a mass of molten iron 

 in the complex slag of which creatures not unlike ourselves shall dwell 

 and dig for mineral treasures, subject to the changed conditions ? Has 

 our planet itself been through that state? Such a supposition is cer- 

 tainly no more extravagant than many we have heard, and the scarcity 

 on the earth of radio-active substances and of the rare-earth elements 

 which are such powerful emitters of the more useful light waves, does, 

 in some measure, support such a theory. 



However, in order to show the immense periods of time which are 

 brought into question, we might borrow the following impressive ex- 

 ample: one cubic centimeter of hydrogen contains approximately 525 

 octillions of atoms; if 10,000 of these were allowed to escape every 

 second it would take about 17 quintillion (17,000,000,000,000,000,000) 

 years to. empty it. Upon a similar basis of expenditure of their con- 

 tained energy by atoms of matter, it is evident that the detection of this 

 expenditure would be very difficult. Before returning to the ether the 

 electric atom or electron must be studied. 



Corpuscles and Electrons 

 To understand what an electron is, we must imagine an ultimate 

 particle — not a particle of matter, nor a particle of force, but just 

 simply " a particle " — and let us give to this particle the old-time attri- 

 bute of the atom ; let us assume it to be indivisible. This, of course, is 

 only a working hypothesis. This particle considered in the abstract we 

 shall call a corpuscle. If we endow it with energy we shall call it an 

 electron. Quite possibly the corpuscle can not exist except as an elec- 

 tron, or atom of negative electricity. However this may be, we must 

 assume, in order to facilitate the discussion, that a corpuscle is only an 

 electron when it is endowed with sufficient motion, which may be either 

 vibrational or translatory, to manifest itself to us electrically. We shall 

 assume that the abstract corpuscle exists, and that it only becomes an 



