Professor J. J. Thompson believes that the source of energy is in the atom itself and not external to it. "The reason," he says, "which induces me to think that the source of the energy is in the atom of radium itself and not external to it is that the radio-activity of substances is in all cases in which we have been able to localize it a transient property. No substance goes on being radio-active very long. It may be asked, how can this statement be reconciled with the fact that thorium and radium keep up their activity without any appreciable falling off with time. The answer to this is that, as Rutherford and Soddy have shown in the case of thorium, it is only an exceedingly small fraction of the mass which is at any one time radio-active, and that this radio-active portion loses its activity in a few hours, and has to be replaced by a fresh supply from the non-radio-active thorium."*11*
If Professor Thompson's view be correct, the amount of potential energy inherent in the atom must be enormous.
RADIO-ACTIVITY AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE ATOM
But whatever the source of the energy displayed by the radio-active substances, it is pretty generally agreed that the radio-activity of the radio-elements results in the disruption of their atoms. Since all substances appear to be radio-active in a greater or less degree, it would seem that, unless there be a very general distribution of radio-active atoms throughout all substances, all atoms must be undergoing disruption. Since the distribution of radio-active matter throughout the earth is so great, however, it is as yet impossible to determine whether this may not account for the radio-activity of all substances.
As we have just seen, recent evidence seems to point to the cause of the disruption of radio-active atoms as lying in the atoms themselves. This view is quite in accord with modern ideas of the instability of certain atoms. It has been suggested that some atoms may undergo a slower disintegration without necessarily throwing off part of their systems with great velocity. It is even possible that all matter may be undergoing transformation, this transformation tending to simplify and render more stable the constituents of the earth. The radio-active bodies, however, are the only ones that have afforded an opportunity for studying this transformation. In these the rapidity of the change would be directly proportionate to their radioactivity. Radium, according to the recent estimate of the Curies, would be disintegrating over a million times more rapidly than uranium. Since the amount of transformation occurring in radium in a year amounts to from 1-2000 to 1-10,000 of the total amount, the time required for the complete transformation of an atom of uranium would be somewhere between two billion and ten billion years--figures quite beyond the range of human comprehension.