ABSTRACT
The progress of science is continually toward a de materialization of matter. Physical analysis resolves the crude, heavy, solid stuff that our senses show us into finer and finer particles further and further apart until these practically disappear into mere points of irradiating influence. First the mass is divided into the molecule and this again into the atom, assumed, at the time it was invented, to be the ultimate unit
of matter. But recently the atom has been shown to be a sort of solar system, but more complex, com posed of hundreds of electrons, corpuscles of electri city, whose radius is calculated to be 1 /10,000,000, 000,000 of a centimetre (a centimetre is s o ------ long). “ But the size of the centres of disturbance, which in Einstein’s theory are associated with matter, bears to the size of the electron about the same proportion as the size of the smallest particle visible under the most powerful microscope to that of the earth itself.” *
The old axiom was “ matter cannot act where it is not.” The new version might rather read : “ matter cannot act except where it is not.” That is to say, attention is now directed to the space surrounding a material body or electrical corpuscle.
