Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 91, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 July 1904 — The Radium Atom. [ARTICLE]

The Radium Atom.

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, the English physicist, contends that radium has not upset received scientific doctrines, fee says that those who thought it was an inexhaustible store of energy, or was generating energy afresh which had not previously existed, were mistaken. The radium atom had in it a large store of energy, Just as the sun had. If they could ste radium atoms they would find them, as a rule, as quiet as any other atoms; only one in a million would be seen to be, as it were, smashing up. throwing off bits of itself, and the whole property of radium depended upon that. Everything material was in a state of flux—there was birth, culmination and decay; and this was a characteristic of the material universe—a universe which must have had an origin. The birth of matter as well as the doath of matter was what they were now looking for.