"During the last few years the energies of science were diverted into military channels," says the "Spectator"? Our leading investigators of Nature turned away from their cloistered walks to dabble in high explosives and gas warfers, hydrophones and depth charges, sound ranging and incendiary bullets, the treatment of gunshot wounds and the prevention of disease among the troops. Now that the advent of peace has permitted them to set up their old apparatus and go on with their interrupted experiments, it would be very interesting to hear from a select committee of the Royal Society what are the hopes of science for the immediate future.
Pror. Soppy's Sratemenr, "Is the world, for instance, on the threshold of a great discovery that will revolutionize our social life as completely as did_ the invention of the steam-engine after the Napoleonic wars! Professor Soddy, who speaks with as high authority on this matter as any living physicist, thinks it not impossible that such a discovery may be made almost at once.
"The new science of radio-activity, which is entirely the product of the 20 years before the war, not} only has raised the veil from the internal mysteries of the atom, but also has indicated as no remote possibility the tapping of a supply of energy as much beyond that of fuel as the latter is beyond brute energy,' Ninety per cent. of the industrial problems of society are soluble by a cheap and abundant source of energy. At present most of our work is done by the combution of fuel, which is anything but cheap.: A "The grave social problem raised by the increasing demands of the miner and the hardly less grave political problem of our commitments in Mesopotamia are alike due to the dependence of our industries on coal and oil. The only substitute hitherto known is water power, white coal' as the French call it. and in most parts of Europe this is not available on a large scale.
"But we know now that a practically inexhaustible source of energy is to be found in the rapid motion of the electrons which, like a miniature solar system, constitute the atoms of all bodies. It has been calculated that the intraatomic energy which might be liberated from a pound of coal, if we could find any way of setting it free and harnessing it to a motor, would do as much work as the burning of 150 tons of coal. Up to the present, indeed, no means of liberating this energy has been discovered. We only know of its existence because a few elements like radium set it free spontaneously, and they are so aula en edna
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.