God and the World: A Survey of Thought

by Arthur William Robinson

The position, as we have described it, was that which may be said to have existed up to about twenty years ago. Since then much new light has come. Indeed, Lord Kelvin, speaking at Clerkenwell on February 26th, 1904, is reported in The Times to have said, referring to the extraordinary progress of scientific research, that it "had, perhaps, been even more remarkable and striking at the beginning of the twentieth century than during the whole of the nineteenth."

Let us take first that which he had more particularly in mind, the advance in the knowledge of the constitution of Matter.

In an address delivered before the British Association at Bradford in 1873, Clerk Maxwell had stated the conclusions to which science had, up to that time, been led in its investigations of matter. Throughout the natural universe it had been shewn, by Spectrum Analysis, that matter is built up of molecules. These molecules, according to the most competent judgment, were incapable of sub-division without change of substance, and were absolutely fixed for each substance. "A molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius, or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time." The relations of the parts and movements of the planetary systems may and do change, but "the molecules—the foundation-stones of the natural universe—remain unbroken and unworn."

As a result of this, it was maintained that "the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of being a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent." "Not that science is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces ... but, in tracing back the history of matter, science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and on the other that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural."

So the case had stood for some while until science, through its indefatigable inquirers, shewed that it was in very deed "not debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule," nor, perhaps, from taking it to pieces. In 1895 came the discovery of the X-rays by Röntgen in Germany, to be followed in a year by Becquerel's discovery of spontaneous radio-activity, and in a couple of years by the remarkable further discovery, made by Madame Curie, of what was termed "radium," a substance that went on producing heat de novo, keeping itself permanently at a higher temperature than its surroundings, and spontaneously producing electricity.

This in itself was a new fact of extraordinary interest. For long, discussion had been waged between two departments of scientific inquirers. The geologists and biologists had demanded hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of millions of years to allow for the developments with which they were concerned. The physicists, led by Lord Kelvin, refused to admit the demand, claiming that it could be proved mathematically that it was impossible that the sun could have been giving out heat at its present rate for more than a hundred million years, at the very outside. The appearance of radium robbed this argument of its cogency. It is true that an examination of the sun's spectrum has not, as yet, revealed any radium lines, but it is well known that helium, a transformation product of radium, is present in it.

And this modification of our views as to the probable age of our solar system was far from being the only result of this latest discovery. Investigations which followed into radio-activity led the Cambridge professors, Larmor and Thomson, to conclude that electricity existed in small particles, which were called "electrons."[[1]] These seem to be the ingredients of which atoms are made. A molecule is composed of two or more atoms. That of hydrogen, for example, has two; that of water three; and so on up to a thousand or more.

Molecules are very small. If a drop of water were magnified to the size of the globe, the molecules would be seen to be less than the size of a cricket ball!

Atoms are much smaller. "The atoms in a drop of water outnumber the drops in an Atlantic Ocean." Electrons are much smaller still—about "a thousand-million-million times smaller than atoms."[[2]]

Within the atom thousands or tens of thousands of these electrons are moving in orderly arrangement, at terrific speed, round and about one another. The amount of energy required to build up a molecule of any degree of complexity is very great, and it is by the breaking down of complex molecules into simple ones that all our mechanical work is done. And this is not all, for not only can the molecule be thus broken in pieces, but the atom itself is capable of disintegration. "Although we do not know how to break atoms up, they are liable every now and then themselves to explode, and so resolve themselves into simpler forms." "Atoms of matter are not the indestructible and immutable things they were once thought."[[3]] The idea of the amount of energy thus revealed as available for all kinds of active work is so vast as to baffle calculation and even imagination. It has been said that there is energy enough in fifteen grains of radium, if it could all be set free at once, to blow the whole British Navy a mile high into the air. The thought that we are thus encompassed on every side by pent up potentialities of force, which if uncontrolled might at any moment work our destruction, may well deepen in us the sense of the need, not only for an originating, but for a continually directing mind to superintend the conduct of the universe.