The atomic theory of corpuscles or electrons fortunately was ready to be applied to this new problem. Of the resulting speculations the most detailed and suggestive is that of J.J. Thomson. ("Phil. Mag." March, 1904.) Thomson regards the atom as composed of a number of mutually repelling negative corpuscles or electrons held together by some central attractive force which he represents by supposing them immersed in a uniform sphere of positive electricity. Under the action of the two forces, the electrons space themselves in symmetrical patterns, which depend on the number of electrons. Three place themselves at the corner of an equilateral ********, four at those of a square, and five form a pentagon. With six, however, the single ring becomes unstable, one corpuscle moves to the middle and five lie round it. But if we imagine the system rapidly to rotate, the centrifugal force would enable the six corpuscles to remain in a single ring. Thus internal kinetic energy would maintain a configuration which would become unstable as the energy drained away. Now in a system of electrons, electromagnetic radiation would result in a loss of energy, and at one point of instability we might well have a sudden spontaneous redistribution of the constituents, taking place with an explosive violence, and accompanied by the ejection of a corpuscle as a beta-ray, or of a large fragment of the atom as an alpha-ray.
The discovery of the new property of radio-activity in a small number of chemical elements led physicists to ask whether the property might not be found in other elements, though in a much less striking form. Are ordinary materials slightly radio-active? Does the feeble electric conductivity always observed in the air contained within the walls of an electroscope depend on ionizing radiations from the material of the walls themselves?
The question is very difficult, owing to the wide distribution of slight traces of radium. Contact with radium emanation results in a deposit of the fatal radium-D, which in 40 years is but half removed. Is the "natural" leak of a brass electroscope due to an intrinsic radio-activity of brass, or to traces of a radio-active impurity on its surface? Long and laborious researches have succeeded in establishing the existence of slight intrinsic radio-activity in a few metals such as potassium, and have left the wider problem still unsolved.
It should be noted, however, that, even if ordinary elements are not radio-active, they may still be undergoing spontaneous disintegration. The detection of ray-less changes by Rutherford, when those changes are interposed between two radio-active transformations which can be followed, show that spontaneous transmutation is possible without measureable radio-activity. And, indeed, any theory of disintegration, such as Thomson's corpuscular hypothesis, would suggest that atomic rearrangements are of much more general occurrence than would be apparent to one who could observe them only by the effect of the projectiles, which, in special cases, owing to some peculiarity of atomic configuration, happened to be shot out with the enormous velocity needed to ionize the surrounding gas.
No evidence for such ray-less changes in ordinary elements is yet known, perhaps none may ever be obtained; but the possibility should not be forgotten.
In the strict sense of the word, the process of atomic disintegration revealed to us by the new science of radio-activity can hardly be called evolution. In each case radio-active change involves the breaking up of a heavier, more complex atom into lighter and ******r fragments. Are we to regard this process as characteristic of the tendencies in accord with which the universe has reached its present state, and is passing to its unknown future? Or have we chanced upon an eddy in a backwater, opposed to the main stream of advance? In the chaos from which the present universe developed, was matter composed of large highly complex atoms, which have formed the ******r elements by radio-active or ray-less disintegration? Or did the primaeval substance consist of isolated electrons, which have slowly come together to form the elements, and yet have left here and there an anomaly such as that illustrated by the unstable family of uranium and radium, or by some such course are returning to their state of primaeval simplicity?