The Restless Atom

by Alfred Romer

"The Restless Atom belongs to the Science Study Series published by the Physical Science Study Committee of Educational Services, Inc., w h o s e main purpose is to provide collateral reading for the secondary school physics program now being developed by the committee. However, the level of presentation is aimed not only at the high school student, but also at the college undergraduate and the general public, by offering to them "the most stirring and fundamental topics of physics, from the smallest known particles to the whole universe." In keeping with this objective, Romer's book is devoted to the discovery of radioactivity and the disentanglement of the laws of spontaneous transmutations of atoms during the 20 years from 1895 to 1915. The author succeeds in fulfilling the aims of the series since his presentation is accurate, but at the same time skillful and sufficiently lively to hold the interest of the reader. The work described in the book was intimately interwoven with obtaining the definite proofs for the existence of atoms and elucidating their structure. The author even writes in his "This is a book about the experiments by which we have gained one section of our knowledge of atoms and the way in which they behave." But if this was his primary aim it is hard to understand the omission of certain material which would have rounded out the subject of the book without appreciably adding to its bulk. (1) More might have been said about the discovery of the electron, which was entirely independent of Roentgen's x-ray discovery although almost contemporaneous with it. Romer regards the x-rays as the beginning of modern physics, but the conception of the electrons was at least of equal importance. It is mentioned in the book that J. J. Thomson was the discoverer of the electrons but nothing is said about the circumstances"

Genres: Physics, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1982

Reviews

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is a history of the early work with atoms – the experiments that built upon each other, probing ever deeper into the then (late 1800s, early 1900s) barely known world of the atoms (1) and, specifically, those elements that self-transformed into other elements via “emanation” (“the power to give out rays from some unknown source of stored-up energy”) in what came to be known as radioactive decay, at a fixed, standardized rate. (2) The book’s emphasis is on technical detail, including the early history of the periodic table (3), with many well-done diagrams to illustrate the various experiments.

(1) “Atomic physics,” Romer writes, “would begin where we have ended [with this book], with the first successes of Rutherford and Bohr’s atomic model. What we have been following here was all preparation for that.”

(2) The book also notes that it was realized at that time that “stable atoms contained…their store of locked-in energy”

(3) “Bohr proposed to give each atom its quota of electrons by numbering the elements in order as they lay in the Periodic Table, and letting the order-number of each element be the number of electrons in its atom….The nucleus carried nearly all the mass of the atom, but it was unimaginably small, and that make it unimaginably remote from the atom’s outermost parts. As Bohr pointed out, it would be these other parts which gave an atom its chemical behavior or the particular pattern of its spectrum.”

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is well-written, although it is difficult to understand. It tells how various scientists captured the concepts about atoms through experimentation. I liked the list of how each element got its name, at the end.