The two were invariably associated in the pitchblende from which the Curies extracted radium. A possibility which has occurred to several minds almost simultaneously is that radium is a product of uraniuri. ![]() However, whether its fixity is greater in the one case than in the other, grave doubts of its permanence are entertained by most of the men who are iiow studying the element. Whether the element, while still intermingled with other substances in the ores in which it is found, undergoes change as rapidly as it does after separation, is a question not yet answered. Joly's guess exceeds these others a hundred or a thousand fold!Ī good deal of attention is now being given to the probable origin of radium. Even the most exacting biologists and geologists demand more than 100,000,000. Lord Kelvin's estimate of the time which has elapsed since the globe cooled sufficiently to sustain animal and vegetable life was between 10,000,000 and 20,000,000. Adopting that element as a standard, then, the Irish physicist says that 10,000,000,000 years may be regarded “a minor limit to the antiquity of matter in our part of the universe.” Rutherford and Joly cannot both be right, apparently, and perhaps neither of them is. Of a given amount of uranium only a ten-thousand-millionth part decays in a year. It has been observed in a laboratory that this metal apparently breaks down, but much more slowly than radium. Joly, of Dublin, reaches an astonishingly different conclusion concerning the earth's age, by confining his attention to the behavior of another metal, uranium. Supposing this to be uniform, he estimates that all which is at present in existence will have' disintegrated in a thousand years, and that all which existed a thousand years ago must now have become transformed into something else-helium, perhaps. That possibility had occurred to him in consequence of observing the rapid rate at which radium decays. Rutherford, of Montreal, created a sensation lecturing before a scientificĪudience in London by suggesting that the earth is much younger than astronomers and physicists have believed. What will be the outcome of this speculation cannot now be foretold, but already a number of amazing guesses and theories have been inspired by the properties of ladium, considered apart from the other phenomena of nature. ![]() No well authenticated discovery made in the last half century-not even that of the distance to which Hertz waves can be transmitted-has stimulated bolder conjectures than have the announcements of M.
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