Article April 8, 1911 Issue

Sir William Crookes made a speech the other day in...

Victoria (B.C.) Colonist

Sir William Crookes made a speech the other day in which the following remarkable sentences occurred: "It seems that no law is more certain than the law of change. A bit of radium that would go into a thimble has suddenly shaken our belief in the conservation of substance, the stability of the chemical elements, the undulatory theory of light, and the nature of electricity. It has revived the dreams of all chemists and the preservation of perpetual youth, and has cast doubts on the very existence of matter itself. For physicists are beginning to say that, in all probability, there is no such thing as matter; that when we have caught and tamed the elusive atom, and have split it into seven hundred little bits, these residual particles will turn out to be nothing more than superimposed layers of positive and negative electricity."

All this serves to show the exquisite folly of those persons who two score years ago thought that Science had said the last word about the mystery of nature and that the mid-Victorian investigators had discovered the end of wisdom. Sir William's few remarks are as if one had lifted the edge of a curtain and given us a glimpse of an immeasurable and unknown arena of research. They suggest that we have yet to learn what things are and what we can do with them.

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April 8, 1911
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