...in Gegensatz du Stellung zu der Unverstablichkeit, nicht zu Sagen der Unvernutftigkeit, der Theoretische Idet... ...der Relativität und der Quantum der Werkung.

Die Hallen ist wann die Elt-Elteren Wissenschaftlichen in sie ein Gedrunen... ...sind, auch zu Fragen, wie weit soch ein Dehlen... ...and sind Wissenschaft...

...enste Neue Mathemescher. I'll repeat that in English. I contrast the extreme simplicity of the conceptions accounting for the new facts... ...disclosed by the discovery of radioactivity and the natural transmutation of the radioactive elements... ...which first brought to our knowledge many of the innermost secrets of the nature of matter...

...with the theories in particular of radio relativity and the quantum of action... ...which developed contemporaneously, at first from the older branches of science...

...which have now invaded and made more complicated the newer. Both of these mathematical theories have a highly transcendental character... ...bordering often on the bizarre, on the fanciful, so as to justify an inquiry...

...as to how far such theories or speculations can properly be considered science at all. It has taken half a century for the clouds to clear away and the picture to become clear... ...but looking backwards from our present-day standpoint, so can we now see... ...that science entered an absolutely virgin and hitherto unpenetrated country...

...when in 1896, Henri Becquerel of Paris discovered radioactivity... ...and which in 1902, 1903, Rutherford and myself interpreted... ...as a process of the natural transmutation of the spontaneous transmutation of the elements.

Though at inconceivably slow rates, in the case of the two elements... ...we are known at the end of the periodic table with the heaviest atoms of all. Thus, under our very eyes going on, what from the very minutes driven...

...empelled the dreams of Everest to effect, namely to transmute one element and the other... ...and particularly base into the noble metals. And without the slightest help from or anticipation by any theory whatever...

...it extended in a single bound a million-fold our former horizons concerning energy and matter... ...with a single exception the crucial theoretical importance of which... ...science was then too young to apprehend and which we will be referred to again. In due course, the whole vast domain of entirely new phenomena in radioactivity...

...were explained by the simplest and most straightforward conceptions... ...by the single idea of the atom disintegrating into two parts... ...one a light part and one a heavy part, the light one being expelled...

...as an appreciable fraction of the velocity of light and so constituting a ray. The heavy atom recalling according to the law the conservation of momentum.

This process of disintegration is repeated over and over again... ...the same type of disintegration at an ever-increasing rate on the average... ...the average lives of the successive members of the disintegration series...

...are periods many times longer than the life of the Earth... ...as it is now determined by radioactive methods by the way... ...in the case of the first two pills, uranium and thorium... ...down to times which are only estimable and that of less than one millionth part of a second.

Now for being first a theory, this quickly passed out of the realm of theory altogether... ...into that of well-established and even directly observed fact. I can well remember the amazement of the world-renowned German microscopist Quinker... ...who at one of our British Association meetings whose life had been spent...

...on the borderland between the visible and the invisible. Nevertheless, dealing with never less than aggregates of atoms... ...hundreds or thousands of times larger than the whole population of the globe...

...when he first learned that a single atom of matter... ...could make a visible scintillation on a zinc sulphide stream... ...he became lost to the world and repeated over to himself... ...in varying tones, a single atom of matter. A single atom of matter.

Such complications as there were arose out of the lengthy sequence of atomic disintegrations... ...of uranium and thorium... ...and the fact which was not finally established nearly 50 years later... ...that for uranium there are two isotopes giving two different series. So that results in an enormous number, relatively, of different new atoms...

...of all degrees of atomic stability. The first were, of course, Madame Curie's well-known radioactive elements... ...powerful radioactive elements she separated from the uranium ore of Bichblin. Polonium, radium and actinium. But only radium of those three exists in quantity, sufficient even to show a spectrum.

Very soon the number of types grew until they were half as large as the known elements... ...some 30 to 40 or more of these evanescent new elements... ...produced for the atomic disintegration of the two parent elements, uranium and thorium. And I may take the liberty of pointing out that this theory was founded on chemistry, not on physics.

The first evidence of transmutation was the radioactive emanations... ...given out by thorium radium and actinium. And here I'll take the opportunity of saying, if I may, that the translation into German...

...which has been circulated, has one or two important errors in it... ...which I propose to call attention. And here, for this particular case, on the seventh line from the fourth line... ...in the last paragraph of page two, unfortunately the word trial of them has been used for emanation.

And there's another important omission at the end, so that if any press man is here and wants to use it... ...I'll trust he'll get from the secretariat a slip to make that good. Otherwise it makes the meaning, it isn't what I intended.

Now, from being... I point out that this first evidence of transmutation... ...was that the emanation of thorium, which Rutherford discovered as a temporary radioactive gas... ...was a member of the newly discovered Argonne family. Ready to say it had no chemical properties at all.

And although that was a new result, to a chemist it meant at once... ...that the thorium was undergoing a transmutation, a natural transmutation... ...although at an excessively slow rate. And then the same was found for the other two emanations.

And Rutherford got his Nobel Prize in 1908 for this work, not in physics but in chemistry. It had nothing whatever to do with the fallacious electrical theory of matter... ...that was then being advocated by the physicists. Or to the recognition of the cathode ray particles of negative electron.

Or to Einstein, who was only, so to speak, arrived after all over with the shouting. The energy of radioactive change as one million times, or the order of one million times...

...the effect of ordinary chemical change was estimated experimentally for the first time... ...by Sir William Ramsey and myself in London in 1903... ...after we had proved an earlier prediction that helium, solar gas, helium...

...discovered by Norman Locke in 1869, was one of the ultimate products of this disintegration. And although I occasionally come across people today who still believe in the old ideas... ...that certainly in the old days some of the alchemical descriptions were correct...

...and people had succeeded in making gold and silver. And that now, of course, is absolutely impossible. If they made gold, the energy required would cost very much more than the gold was worth. And if they'd affected any transmutation at all, of course, it would have all gone up in smoke without a doubt.

Now, this discovery has been represented mainly by physicists... ...as upsetting the fundamental options of chemistry, but it's nothing of the sort. It's true it was unexpected, but then so was radioactivity. At first it seemed to disobey the very laws of the conservation of matter and energy.

And it remained, of course, a long unpopular with the high priests of the subject at that time. As Dr. Hahn in his book, The New Atoms, recalls, when so late as 1904, 1907... ...he was referred to as an Anglicised Berliner for indiscreetly advocating the new doctrine.

On the contrary, the new discovery extended enormously... ...the knowledge of the difference between the atom and the molecule. Chemists have never said that atoms were not transmutable, but merely that they did not...

...or could not be transmuted. That's a different story. And it was totally due to this accurate knowledge of the difference between the atom and the molecule in 1900... ...that the nature of radioactivity was instantly recognised. And also, it was due to the fact that it had not been recognised by the physicists at that time...

...that they regarded the discovery of the electron, a particle a thousand times smaller than the hydrogen atom... ...as evidence of transmutation. Nothing of the sort. Now I pass on to something which was upsetting to a chemist. Although it doesn't have any definite attitude or theory.

But it was upsetting to the chemist's pride to learn that his method of analysis of matter... ...was not the ultimate fundamental analysis into homogeneous elements that he had hitherto supposed to be.

On the contrary, it was through radioactive evidence, inevitably, as we now know... ...through the discovery of the disintegration of the atom... ...that another of the very best kept secrets in nature was revealed.

And that was the nature of isotopes. So that today, as you all know, we know that exceptionally rather than normally... ...the elements are not homogeneous. That they consist of a mixture, on the average, of very many isotopes for each element.

These isotopes being chemically identical, completely non-separable by any process of chemical analysis... ...and yet easily separable by, not easily separable, only theoretically easily separable by diffusion. As a matter of practice, diffusion is such a very difficult process...

...that it remained until the First World War, in the production of the first atomic bomb... ...that diffusion was ever used in industry for the separation of two different substances. And I believe that cost a considerable number of, possibly many hundreds...

...well, millions, possibly, of dollars to do. It's a most difficult process in practice. Another discovery was really shown to be inevitable... ...by Hahn's work with Rutherford and Ramsey, first with Ramsey and then with Rutherford... ...discovering these two new radioactive elements between thorium and thorium X...

...which was the element that Rutherford and I found in 1904... ...was a second step which made it inevitable that the conclusion that the atoms were undergoing disintegration... ...when we found that the emanation of thorium, which I referred to as an argon gas...

...which was easily characterized therefore, was not produced in thorium directly... ...but through the intermediacy of an intermediate body which we named thorium X. And Hahn found, of course, that between the thorium X and the thorium... ...between the thorium and thorium X were two long-lived bodies...

...which so early as 1907, McCoy and Ross, two American chemists... ...thorium chemists, let's say they were experts in the subject chemistry of thorium... ...which is a difficult element, had declared categorically were chemically inseparable by any process.

And it is of interest to recall that almost at once, in the minerals which Madame Curie worked with... ...another radio element was found, radio lead, which is inseparable chemically from lead. And then it came about, of course, that Hahn discovered the mesothorium after the radio thorium...

...and McCoy and Ross at once interpreted it correctly... ...that Hahn had not separated radio thorium from thorium as he had first, I suppose... ...which is completely impossible. What he had done was to separate from thorium, mesothorium...

...the parent of radio thorium, and then from the mesothorium after it had grown the radio thorium... ...being free from the thorium, he separated the radio thorium from the mesothorium. That made it inevitable, you see, that you couldn't possibly miss the second discovery of isotopes...

...if you knew correctly what the first discovery of the nature of radioactivity was. Now, later, as you all know, he extended this to the biological field. You've been hearing a lot from Professors Whipple, Dermark, and Prof. Van Hevete...

...of the use of these isotopes as traces in medicine. Giving to the medical man a discovery similar to that of Rötgen X-rays... ...that enables him to find out what is going on inside the body... ...without opening it up or without surgical interference of any kind.

Just the same as the Rötgen rays of the second sight to the surgeon. Reverting now to the isotope. The climax occurred in 1911-13 after I discovered that Hans' mesothorium was an isotope of radium... ...and attempted in vain by Madame Curie's method of separating radium from barium...

...by fractional crystallization to separate mesothorium from radium. And so this enabled me to take the first step in the interpretation of the periodic law. The separate places in the periodic law are not connected directly with the mass of the atom... ...but are connected with their internal electrical charge.

The expression of the alpha particle, which is a doubly positively charged atom of helium... ...sends the element two places nearer the beginning in the periodic table. Then my sister, Alexander Fick, who is now the president of the Imperial Chemical Industries of Great Britain... ...who was demonstrated in Malabar at the time, got the beta effect of the beta change...

...which is a single negative charge, and he found that it set the element one place forward. And it's really obvious in that, without any nuclear theory at all, I think... ...that the excessive places in the periodic table corresponded with unit integral differences... ...in their internal atomic structure, integral differences of atomic charges.

And it's instantly cleared up the whole subject in a flash. Then, after the war... Well, I'll just leave that for a moment. Now, just as there was no vintage vestige of a hint in all the earlier literature... ...of the magnitude of the internal energy of the atom...

...so there is none, whatever, of the possible existence of isotopes... ...these chemically identical forms of the same element, differing only in their stability... ...and also sometimes in their atomic mass, or both. And from the vantage point of these radioactive elements...

...we then had to think back, as it were, to the common elements... ...and ask ourselves, for what evidence we should have... ...if the ordinary elements were also not mixtures of isotopes... ...and the surprising thing was that we had none, whatever. There was no reason for them not to be ordinary common elements... ...like iron, which we've just been hearing, not consisting of many isotopes.

And the work of the prediction or idea was quickly verified by F.W. Ashton... ...after the war by means of his mass spectroscope... ...which has now been enormously improved... ...and I'm glad to say the material finest instrument in the world...

...is in mice, under Professor Mattel... ...which does measure the individual masses of the single atom... ...not of the average masses of the atomic atom... ...as the ordinary chemical methods do. And this atomic mass, Ashton, found at always approximately integral...

...on the basis of oxygen at 16, foreshadowing the later discovery... ...by Bertrand Becker in Germany of the neutron... ...the uncharged particle of the same mass, approximately, as a hydrogen atom. Now, uniformly, in the whole immense advance of knowledge...

...there's been nothing essentially difficult for the layman to understand and appreciate... ...if it had been historically presented to him... ...in order to let him in, as it were, on the ground floor in his ignorance... ...on a level with the pioneers who made these discoveries before they'd made them.

But now, in a short space of less than hardly more than 50 years... ...the natural order has been entirely reversed... ...from the experimental to the theoretical. No, one can hardly read an exposition on the subject which doesn't begin at the end.

And the wretched layman is deluged by to him an utterly meaningless ferrago... ...of mesons and neutrinos and nucleons and nuclei and neutrons and protons... ...which don't mean a thing to him at all... ...before he's allowed even to enter the seminal subject of radioactivity which started it all.

And he gets, I suppose, as good a truer notion of radioactivity, but he does arrive... ...as you'd get of the real world if you studied a textbook on algebra. And to hide the real origins, to make it appear that they originated in the brains of the mathematical physicists...

...the very name of the subject has now been changed, if you please, to nuclear physics. Well, a Weg once remarked, a Cambridge Weg once remarked about chemistry... ...that it was a messier part of physics. And so I think we can retort, as I've already told you this is a chemical and not a physical discovery...

...that nuclear physics is a guessier part of nuclear chemistry... ...the subject, as the Nobel awardees recognised so early as 1908...

...is essentially a chemical rather than a physical subject. Now I've entitled this address to the wider aspects of atomic disintegration... ...but if I do, for the moment, claim the privilege and prerogative... ...the patent of beginning at the end instead of at the start... ...then I shall begin with the widest wall and it's this... ...that we see clearly from this which has happened in radioactivity under our eyes...

...what has been happening to knowledge from the beginning of time. Ever since the days of the first academy in Greece, centuries before the birth of Christ... ...knowledge has been perverted to bolster up some preconceived notion of philosophy.

But the original Greek philosophers, before the triumvirate of Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle... ...seem to have been genuinely scientific in pursuing knowledge for its own sake. With regard to knowledge, half the population, of course, is only interested in asking what it used to do.

Like when Fairdale was asked by Dresden, what's the use of your electromagnetic induction? He said, you might be able to text it one day. But to the other half, it's a source of ingenuity in trying to account for this new knowledge... ...and to make a theory which will bring it in. Whereas the really scientific minds, like Robert Boyle, who founded chemistry...

...and wrote a book called The Skeptical Chemist, are rare sweets by comparison... ...to these two sorts, those who want to use knowledge and those who want to explain it. I remember Esther who asked and who I mentioned, and who began life as a chemist... ...while he was living in the monastic substitution of his home of Ron's theories at Cambridge...

...saying to me, quite all candidly, one day that chemistry was now a branch of technology... ...and owed to its superior sister, physics, everything with theoretical basis. But on the other hand, I think that now is in the time of Robert Boyle...

...antagonism rather than cooperation has developed between the theory of the experiment... ...and it is again necessary for chemistry to put theory into its proper place... ...rather than the purpose and the goal of science. What I have to complain of about these theoretical theories which are foisted upon the chemist...

...is that they convey not the slightest hint as to the commonest properties of matter. Mainly, for example, that bromine is a red stink, iron, an invaluable metal. There's a bit of it. In the task of understanding these 92 metal elements, each one is an individual law...

...still unto itself has to be learned for the chemist. The theory for the most part is either a useless irreverence... ...or a boring attempt to force into a theoretical mold effects. Boyle's physical theory, the atom, for example, is a relic of the days when the spectrum...

...was supposed to be the key to the nature of the atomic structure... ...where we now know, in quantum theory, that the spectrum of hydrogen... ...the simplest possible structure, can consist of an infinite number of lines. There are no few strong enough that we see.

It's an important property for identifying an element, as far as the chemist is concerned... ...but Boyle was really not explaining chemical character at all by his theory. He was using the known knowledge in chemistry to explain the complex spectra...

...of elements heavier than hydrogen, which everybody knows. Anybody in quantum dynamics knows that you can't really study mathematically... ...the problem of three bodies in independent motion. When you come to the heavier elements, you may have a different hundred or more... ...particles in motion producing these results.

So that there's only a few theories, probably in the very first element. And so you've still got to learn all the facts, as well as the theory... ...and you might just as well begin with the facts rather than the theory.

So far as the... Take an example of what I'm trying to... ...it matters not to the medical man, the very least you have to learn... ...the number of protons, neutrons and negatrons and the various isotopes... ...which he makes use of in his work. That's entirely up to him to look for...

...what we already know, the atomic number and the atomic weight of the isotope. All he has to know is what it is an isotope of chemically... ...and how this new method enables him to study from the outside... ...without interference with the normal processes of the body... ...and what is going on at the greatest possible ease.

Especially now, since the mass... ...production of neutrons in the uranium pile... ...the peaceful use of atomic energy, a distinct from the atomic bomb... ...it's now possible to make a radioactive isotope of almost every known element... ...and provide a certain isotope of carbon...

...and so on, as traces elements. There was no theory of whatever involved in any of this... ...either the discovery of isotopes or the displacement law... ...which interpreted the periodic system. Now to turn abruptly from this experimental to the theoretical side...

...more strictly the mathematical side... ...I think that we have to make a distinction. A lot of it, of course, is quite legitimate and quite simple. It's only the extravagances about which I am complaining.

To me, one of the greatest dangers of the age... ...and I'm not now referring to scientific men... ...but I refer to the world at large... ...this pathetic belief that mathematics cannot lie. Whereas, as a matter of fact, it can be the biggest liar of all... ...if you misunderstand what mathematical result really is.

It's one of the present dangers of the age. I've already mentioned... ...I admitted it when I was speaking... You have to go back in the history of the subject right to the beginning...

...to the Hindu mathematicians... ...when they invented negative quantities... ...and justified those negative quantities from the analogy of debt. And it's this idea... ...which has now converted political economy... ...I'm not speaking, I'm speaking of the world political economy...

...which, if it is political, should be a science of wealth... ...into what is nothing but a science of debt... ...which, as political economy, is both disastrous and suicidal. Oh, well, that subject in my country is taboo... ...and I suppose it is in yours too. So I'll leave it quickly.

Then we go on next to the next step... ...where, about two centuries ago... ...mathematicians solved a great number of very difficult problems... ...by the use of the imaginary operator, the root of minus one. It's only imaginary in the sense, I mean, that it can be...

Well, the mathematicians at the present time prefer to call this a complex number... ...rather than imaginary. Imaginary is certainly a very bad term... ...for the point about this root of minus square root of minus one... ...is that you can't imagine it... ...any more than you can imagine the geometry of any dimensions of space.

A better term would be absolutely to call it irrational. It's a useful operator, but the point is... ...that you must eliminate it from your answer... ...even though that's true for the minus quantity. There's no such thing as a minus peak.

The taxpayer cannot take from you three pounds... ...when you earn it two and leave you with minus one per. All he can do is make your own for it. But it's more clear in this case of this root of minus one. It arose, of course, because in the solution of equations of even order...

...like the quadratic, to begin with, is the simplest... ...but any other will do. In certain ranges of the coefficients of the equation... ...you get the square root of a minus quantity... ...which, of course, is mathematically irrational. Now these happen, you see, when you add them together...

...they must occur in pairs. It's always the root of plus and minus... ...the root of this negative quantity in the solution. And so it does not apply, you see, to the cubic equation... ...which can sling down any coefficients at random... ...and it must have a real root.

That's not the case for the even order. It was a skillful intermediate use of this operator... ...that eliminated them before the end... ...which solved many of the problems of the time. I've mentioned the cosine series and the sine series... ...and the exponential series and so on.

There's nothing legitimate as long as you leave it out. I'm not going to get rid of it before the end. I do think it's time to characterize the irrational solution... ...as a backward step into the realm of fantasy and mysticism... ...attending, if not intended, to bring science... ...and to contribute to the general public...

...a source of satisfaction only to the traditional enemies... ...of science, dogma, charlatanry and obscurantism. There's no objection, of course, of mathematicians... ...doing whatever he pleases in his own field. All I'm objecting to is calling it science... ...or pretending it has any relation to science. Quite definitely, before you can enter the realm of science...

...you have to get back to the Earth. If you put one foot at any rate on the ground... ...we have to thank God for the medical men and for the engineers... ...that they can't go up into the n dimensions of space... ...and leave the Earth altogether as mathematicians... ...in the habit of doing. Finding a problem at home is rather difficult. He invented a world that is more or less easy for him to solve.

Now, the first use of this, I think, occurred in the theory of relativity... ...when in Minkowski's four-dimensional continuum... ...the root of one, minus root of minus one, multiplied by time... ...is regarded as the fourth dimension.

And that is certainly, it wasn't objected to by Einstein... ...in his little book that he wrote for the laity. In fact, he described it, that to me, as a first use... ...first backward step into this realm of fantasy and mysticism... ...from which we've emerged. Look at any modern mathematical paper.

Why, it's exactly the same as the old mystical alchemical symbols... ...representing transmutation. In both cases, the symbols are physically uninterpretable. The history of this theory of radioactivity is a very curious one... ...because it is the exact inverse of that of the quantum theory of action... ...in many ways.

The famous deduction about the speed of the mass of a sub-urban body... ...which, increasingly, the speed was not, of course, from relativity at all. The electromagnetic theory of light which preceded it... ...was tested by Kaufman as early as 1904 or 1903...

...for the beta particle radium, which is an electron moving... ...with a speed of light, and it's found to be true. And at that time, of course, it really meant that... ...the mass of the electron was electromagnetic rather than material.

But then Einstein, in 1905, threw over the whole of the electromagnetic theory. He didn't even bother about it. He deduced the theory of relativity as applying equally to all matter... ...not merely to the electric charge. It all arose from the experiment of Michelson and Morley in 1887...

...as to attempt to put into evidence the ether, the luminiferous ether... ...who found, and it was confirmed by Morley later... ...Morley and the chemist, and Michelson, a physicist... ...that the velocity of light is absolutely invariantly restricted... ...to the movement of the transmitter and the receiver...

...and that it remains one inexplicable fact. For my own part, I very much prefer an inexplicable fact... ...which is easy to understand, as a fact... ...how difficult it may be to explain... ...to a theory which does not explain the fact... ...but goes out into some imaginary idea, some imaginary world...

...which has no relation to the world in which we live. Now, this is the opposite of the quantum theory of Planck... ...which is, to me, at any rate, a far preferable theory. In 1902, Planck's theory received a number of...

...quite good verifications by a large number of common phenomena... ...but at first it was completely inexplicable... ...completely unaccountable by any rational idea. However, in about 1921, Prince Louis de Broglie... ...in 1924, I think it was... ...made the suggestion that every moving particle has the property of a wave...

...called wave mechanics... ...and the stationary states of the Bohr theory... ...which are due to the atomicity of action as a dynamical quantity... ...the angular momentum in this case... ...that it can only exist in atoms like electrons or like matter...

...although it is a dynamical quantity, which is Planck's theory. That would be explained by the electron having a wave associated with it... ...and his orbit could be replaced by a standing wave. Those could only be possible for certain radii... ...because the two ends would interfere with each other...

...if a trough met a trough... ...if a trough met a crisp... ...rather than the two crisps coinciding... ...the ordinary phenomenon of interference of light. And there's no mathematical... ...minus one mathematical humbug about the quantum theory. The attempt of Heisenberg...

...to explain it by the principle of indeterminacy... ...which it now may be broadly stated to mean... ...that there's no certainty in nature of the old determinism... ...of Cartesian dynamics... ...but only at different degrees of probability... ...as the future naturally vents...

This has had, as a matter of fact, already... ...received its simplest and strongest support... ...from the law of radioactive change. But as I've already indicated, science has been too young... ...to realize the enormous theory it will import of that law... ...because chemical dynamics itself is dead in its infancy.

Before, the average life of the atom... ...remains exactly the same however long it's lived. That is not a theory at all. It's a fact. One can with great ease take the radon from radium... ...which has been living, already survived a month...

...and it only won 500th part of its initial quantity... ...and compare its rate of change... ...with that of newly born radon atoms up there... ...a present five minutes ago from a freshly generating radium solution. And you'll find that however great the difference... ...there's no difference, whatever, in the rate at which they disintegrated. The average life is independent of the past.

There's absolutely no difference from anything we know, of course... ...in the nature, in biology. What one complains about here is rather the supporters... ...really don't frankly face up to the difficulties of the theory... ...which I now try and deal with.

Firstly, there's all the difference in the world... ...between the two types of rays. Light, it consists of photons, supposed to, quantum theory... ...so much to say about that. X-rays, analogs, radioactivity, gamma rays...

...also these are examples of waves... ...in that you can't get any visible effect... ...such as counting, which you can for the particles... ...the alpha and beta particles. And the cathode rays. The one class do not affect the Geiger counter...

...and can't be made visible. It's light, the X-ray, gamma rays... ...and the other class can. That has never been properly explained. It's a fundamental difficulty that ought to have been explained. Instead of that we are treated to a whole diarrhea... ...of the word spinning, which doesn't alter the fact. To explain the Michelson and Morley experiment...

...the Reds in Germany, long before Einstein... ...and the Fitzgeralds in Ireland... ...affected what they call the transformation... ...which, to put it lightly, was a cooking... ...of the fundamental units of mass, length and time...

...in order to make the velocity of light constant. And the cooking factor, a very simple one... ...root of one, so we'll call it f... ...one minus v squared, root of one minus v squared... ...where v is the velocity of the receiver...

...relatively to the transmitter... ...in terms of the velocity of light as unity. For that purpose the mass and time was stretched... ...by dividing by that factor... ...and the third dimension of length was increased...

...by multiplying by it. But if any schoolboy had done that, you see... ...he would have been regarded as committing a horrible crime. He'd have probably been lucky if he'd have kept a thrashing... ...with a higher or, shall we say, more mighty mathematicians. Perhaps they have no sense of shame, whatever, in doing anything like that.

And that justifies my earlier simulation... ...that the really dangerous fliers of this world are mathematicians... ...if you don't, if you're fool enough to believe them. One perhaps can palliate this crime... ...so far as Lorenz is generally concerned. I can't believe they went good enough mathematicians...

...not to know what they were doing. But they could at any rate say that they were merely trying... ...to cap a mathematical method... ...which is absolutely inextricable in the very instance of velocity of light. And the real culprit with Einstein... ...I needn't a word mine to condemn him... ...because de Broglie, an admirer, has done so already...

...in his seventh volume of his library of living philosophers... ...Albert Einstein, philosopher and scientist. He says that Lorenz's transformation for still contraction... ...appeared to be obvious as his permitting one to account...

...that certain aspects of the electromagnetic field... ...are excluding their profound significance. But then came Albert Einstein... ...for him the Lorenz transformation formulas... ...were not simple mathematical relations... ...defining a change of variables...

...convenient for studying the equations of electromagnetism. My word a mathematician can tie himself up in a knot... ...without you understanding a word and what you mean. But as I said it was merely a device... ...cooking the units, a device for making... ...would like to have a constant... ...brilliant piece of mathematics of course...

...but nothing more. He goes on, it was a daily hypothesis... ...before which the first efficacious mind... ...will Lorenz recoil, rather Lorenz-like. And that started what is this pretentious humbug about relativity... ...the Minkowski's four-dimensional continuum... ...which has time applied by the root of minus one...

...as a fourth dimension if you please. And this is the first example... ...of the retention of this physically absurd... ...irrational physical operator... ...in the answer to a problem. And that was followed by the irregular utterances...

...of genes in England... ...who remarked that God must have been a mathematician... ...at Eddington... ...and their books became bestsellers in England. It's to me incredible... ...and I think to the lasting shame... ...of my countrymen for their lack of common sense. The late professor Susan Stebbings...

...of the University of London... ...a professor of philosophy... ...with the age-long experience... ...of her sex... ...of the posturing male... ...summed the whole thing up in a review... ...by saying all of this means just nothing at all. And I agree.

And now, if you come to an important point... ...which has been omitted in my translation... ...which we'll get from the office later slip... ...this paragraph is to be noted... ...that this does not apply...

...to the really great achievement of Einstein... ...in identifying mass and energy. That must be regarded as a legitimate application... ...of the mathematical artifice... ...for making the velocity of light invariant. There's no imaginary term involved. But as regards this transformation itself...

...there's no difference at all... ...between the experimental observation... ...that the velocity of light is invariant... ...and the mathematical explanation... ...that it is as though... ...the three fundamental dimensions... ...which the mass, length and time... ...were stretched or shrank to make itself.

It's a perfect example of the old adage... ...which was quite well believed in in my youth... ...that today is unpopular with a modern mathematician... ...that by mathematical reasoning... ...you can only get out in the answer... ...what you've already put into the enunciation... ...whether you know it or not. But this cannot be said of Einstein's deduction...

...this is the part that's been omitted. I'll begin now. It cannot be said of Einstein's deduction... ...from the Lorentz transformation... ...that the internal energy of matter... ...is nine times 10 to the power of... ...hertz per gram. This is on the blackboard. And there's the important equation... ...that I've written down. E, internal energy of matter...

...because M0, the mass of the matter at rest... ...motion squared, velocity of light, C squared. E equals MC squared. That can't be said of that fundamental advance. And I myself regard it as still a little doubtful...

...as to how far this was a colossal piece of luck. Of course it couldn't have had any interpretation at all... ...until they knew the internal energy of the atom. As a matter of fact I don't think it would have applied to Einstein... ...to have the meaning that it's given to today. Today that was done by Sir Joseph Thomson in England. Ten years later, whether it was a colossal piece of luck...

...or if it's not, it's then a new step... ...in the theory of scientific reasoning... ...as contrasted with what was believed in my youth... ...that you did not get out by mathematical reasoning... ...anymore, wittingly or not, put already into the enunciation. To me, the two theories, the quantum theory...

...and the theory of relativity cancel out to a very large extent. They are completely inconsistent in certain respects. Chiefly, I'm going to talk about the photon. In the old electromagnetic theory of light, of course... ...light was a spreading pulse through the medium called the ether...

...a spherical pulse, and therefore there was nothing to prevent it... ...not going where there was nothing to go to. But your modern idea of a photon is, of course... ...it's the excess energy of the electron... ...when it changes its orbit from one more distance from the centre... ...to one nearer, it has a gain of energy...

...just as a stone falling would have, which is twice as great... ...as required to maintain it in its new orbit... ...so that half of its energy, you see that it is gained... ...goes off as a single photon. Now, that's the gain of the quantum theory... ...the specificity of action, not of energy... ...as Einstein muddled it up, calling a photo...

...thinking that this indicated an atomic curve to energy. Nothing was thought. It's the energy multiplied by the time... ...or frequency of the light which is involved. It is dynamically a very much older quantity than energy... ...and is called the unfortunate term action.

And that seems to have rendered the whole of the arguments... ...by which ein relativity was originally justified... ...as completely out of date. It's a good example, in my opinion... ...of the progress on the mathematical side... ...being as much in the back as in the forward direction.

The real point, of course, is why light has a velocity at all now. The invariance of the velocity of light is trivial in comparison. How on earth can you think it even remarkable that light is invariable... ...when you know nothing, whatever, as to why light goes?

The old electromagnetic theory, of course, did give you a complete explanation... ...but that has been thrown overboard. So that now this photon seemed to me to offer a definite challenge... ...to this theory of Einstein. It's perfectly obvious from this theory...

...that since a body of finite mass... ...can never have the velocity of light... ...if energy were to come into it, if it did... ...this M0 here, if it's nothing, so much so is ein. I'm not saying that this is the only way that Einstein can be represented...

...but it's certainly the common way. Now, the photon moves at the velocity of light... ...and it's raised mass to speed here... ...and therefore its energy is here by that equation. It's not my business to get the mathematical physicists out of this class stick. I'll leave that to Professor Heidenberg, if you care to do so.

One might say, for example, that the Einstein equation is a one-way street... ...and although mass can be represented as an equivalent quantity of energy... ...that's not true of energy, like the energy of a photon...

...being always a definite quantity of mass. That's not my business. I merely point out the absolute absurdity of the two theories at the present time... ...one of the things for which we complain that the real problems in the sphere are not cannons. To a scientific man, it was an outrage...

...the way that the mathematicians, wanting to verify Einstein's equation... ...crowded into the eclipse expedition... ...which was to verify the bending of a ray of light... ...very fast to the limit of the Sun in an eclipse some years ago. Such people, biased, already in favour of the theory, ought to have been excluded altogether.

The object of the expedition was to find out the facts. Actually, the errors of observation, the corrections that have to be made... ...for atmospheric conditions and temperature and so on... ...far exceed the magnitude of the effect that they're trying to establish. The far line can make out this antimony between the two theories...

...makes the... ...if the photon has to be regarded as a massless particle... ...with definite energy, which undoubtedly the energy is definite enough... ...then I don't see why it should have been deflected at all by the Sun... ...one of the Einstein predictions.

Now, I'll just put what I've been saying in German to give it greater force. The relativity theory is... ...that the ground is not for the Sun... ...but for the Sun in the Sun. The Sun in the Sun and the Sun.

However, yet... ...yet marked their quantum theory... ...as very unmerglish to the Sun... ...we, over room... ...licht überhalt... ...sich vor klanst. This is the best... ...beiswild auf führer... ...that ein fort schrütter zu gennänte...

...in der Mathemäster... ... und der neue in wurten... ...beiswurren... ...eben zu gud ein rückwert... ...els ein vor war schreit in der Deutschen Karmen. Yes, yes, wir wir sagen in... ...intra-English bridge work... ...train at the net and swallow a camel... ...in Deutsch...

...en ein mücke ersticken... ...en ein camel in unterschücken. The mückel is the invariability... ...and the camel is the velocity. This idea of the sky high wall... ...of modern speculation... ...of the cosmic core physicists... ...in my opinion is that...

...biologists are rushing into physical chemistry... ...because the problems of their own subject... ...are too difficult... ...and they are studying merely the... ...physical chemistry of the living body... ...rather than life. So the mathematicians have gone off the deep end... ...in dimensions... ...because they found problems of this world... ...too difficult to be solved.

The cosmic... ...this idea, for instance, of the... ...expanding universes... ...the light of the universe... ...expanding with the velocity of light and so on... ...can be utterly irrational... ...and a reflection on common sense... ...intended rather than otherwise... ...to bring science into contempt.

Out of all the talk of speculation... ...the one in the explicit fact remains... ...the velocity of light is invariant... ...as though... ...the fundamental unit shrunk... ...and stretched to make itself. That has yielded a number of experimental... ...results... ...but in other directions also...

...cosmical... ...speculations seem to be encountering... ...unanswerable contradictions... ...one of them I referred to... ...last meeting... ...which Powell found... ...from his latest results on the... ...cosmical rays that some of these rays... ...had energy a thousand times greater... ...from the complete annihilation into... ...energy of a thousand times...

...with a thousand of the heaviest atoms known. And the idea that this is due to... ...a thousand times cyclotron or otherwise... ...seem to be just about as fanciful... ...as Maxwell's shocking demon... ...where he imagined that... ...you could up the second law of thermodynamics... ...by having an intelligent being... ...who when he saw a molecule coming along... ...open the door...

...let it through if it were fast... ...and shut it if it... ...could upset the second law of thermodynamics. The idea of a gigantic... ...cyclotron producing such particles... ...cosmical particles from the heavens... ...from the thousand times of the energy... ...that you can get by now... ...making a thousand uranium atoms... ...inexplicable.

All those inexplicable facts... ...which are far easier to accept... ...than all this nonsense that's being... ...spread about trying to explain them. Well, that's as far as my time allows. I've been exactly an hour. I began this lecture for the time it ought to have ended. So it's not my fault. I had brought from Oxford... ...half of a dozen slides...

...on what was a rather interesting... ...to me a legitimate application... ...of irrational mathematics... ...to a geometrical problem... ...which I had solved some thirteen years ago... ...by Professor Proxeter... ...of the University of Toronto... ...in four-dimensional geometry... ...a perfectly legitimate and interesting deduction. But if anybody wants to see those slides...

...you must arrange with the authorities... ...for a time in which you can see them. I'm perfectly willing to show them... ...to anybody that's interested. I thank you very much indeed for your...