The World within the atom
The World within the atom
As long as man has been on the earth he has been an explorer and has expanded his world. For centuries the scenes of adventure were on the earth's surface, with the science of geography mapping the conquests and making them useable. Now that the entire surface is familiar, explorers have turned to the depths of the sea and the heights of the sky. The first plane left the ground in 1905 and by 1950 rockets had soared upward 250 miles, as far straight up as London is distant from Paris. Today boys dream of flying to neighbouring planets. Meanwhile great telescopes have made the twinkling stars real and beyond the stars the distant galaxies are now being counted and mapped. Our imagination reaches upward and outward beyond the sky, as in former days it played on unknown lands beyond the sea.
All this is well known. But few persons understand that exploration has also gone far in the opposite direction inwards. It is harder to visualize because the materials around us wood and stone and metal-seem so solid. Yet within these and all other materials are molecules and within them are atoms and, in turn, within the atoms are still smaller particles, the proton, the electron and many more. There seems no limit to smallness, and research explores ever inward into the smallest as it does outward into the ! great universe.
This is the scene of today's adventures and exploration, as thrilling as any geographic or spatial expedition, and as important to man's future life. It is important that people everywhere open their minds to it and become familiar with the facts. For here is a strange world where solid matter turns out to be almost empty, where particles move at incredible speeds, where they even disappear and become energy, where energy itself is composed of particles, and where time is measured in millionths of a second. But once these new conceptions are accepted and a few new words are learned there is nothing too complicated to understand-unless one has the curiosity to master the atom completely and, in that case, thorough mathematical study is essential.
There is one important reason why the world within the atom must be better known. That is because popular ignorance of the subject has given the atom a bad name. To the vast majority atomic energy means horrendous explosions. and the frightful weapons that could wipe out civilization.
It is the tragedy of this new: Science that it happened to come to fruition in 1939 just when the last great war began and. it was almost immediately put to work to increase military power. It was wholly unknown to most persons when the first atomic bomb was exploded and so it burst on mankind with an unforgettable shock. And it should not be forgotten. Yet this military use-or misuse-of the new knowledge is only one special aspect, forcibly developed by war.
To ignore the entire science with all its possibilities for the good of mankind is like closing one's mind to all aviation and all peaceful uses of the airplane because, during the war, aviation provided the merciless bomber. There is little attitude of fear and horror today toward the airplane. So too there is a world of benefit in the medical, industrial and agricultural uses of the atomic rays. There are revelations on the nature of matter and the structure of the universe. There are the beginnings of many new sciences and the indications of a good life in the years to come for our children, if not for us.
It is today fully as important to know about the particles within the atom as it was to learn about the mysterious new America centuries ago, or about Pasteur's discovery of the germs that cause disease two generations ago, and about the invention of the airplane fifty years ago. The frontiers of man's knowledge are now within the atom. This series of articles has the purpose of bringing this new world to the schools, of answering the questions that children today ask their teachers and their parents. It is a story to explain why Unesco called together the experts in atomic science from the European nations to co-operate in researches on atomic structure and on highenergy particles, since the costs are almost too high for any one nation to bear alone. European students and scholars can soon have facilities equal to the best since twelve nations have recently joined to create the European Council for Nuclear Research (called CERN from its initials in French), with a great new laboratory in the city of peace, Geneva.
And so this is a story of international co-operation in explorations at the borderland of man's knowledge. It is a story that should help to make the new wordslike cosmic rays, protons, and mesons-familiar in the common speech of all nations. Its purpose is to help incorporate the world within the atom into the common culture of mankind.
But there is no discussion in these articles of bombs, of plutonium, or of atomic reactors and piles. Those are military applications of this new knowledge and they represent only a small and specialized application of the new science, largely secret and perhaps only temporary. In these uses the atoms are destroyed by fission and their matter is violently converted into explosive energy.
This is a very different subject from the cosmic rays that reach earth from outer space, from the wondrous uses of radium in curing disease, and from the inspiring new conception of the atom as a universe in itself, as complex as a galaxy of stars, filled with unknown radiations, alive with action, of particles within particles, and of puzzles wrapped in mystery. Explosive fission for military purposes is a misuse, born of man's incapacity in social and international affairs. It is not a necessary nor a legitimate part of man's new knowledge of nature.
The scientific facts and principles explained on these pages are not only the property of all mankind and the result of research in many nations, but are truly an expansion of man's universe. As the great explorers mapped the earth, and the astronomers chart the sky, so the atomic scientist, delving into matter and energy, has discovered an unknown world that is a revelation for philosophers and a vast resource for fortune generations. No educated person can afford to ignore them.