Abstract
IF the genius of John Dalton gave the chemist a freehold title to the atom, the work of Becquerel and the Curies may be said to have transferred the title to the physicist, or at least to have granted him an indeterminable repairing lease of the property. The physicist has made good use of his tenure: he has determined the structure and conditions of stability of the atom, and by embellishing its parts with attractive and repulsive signs, he has thrown light upon many things that were previously obscure, and revealed new avenues of research for the investigator. Except for some tentative efforts to formulate an electronic theory of valency, the chemist has, for the most part, been out of the picture; and even when Rutherford used d-particles to disintegrate certain light atoms, the chemist was denied participation by the circumstance that the quantities of material involved were too minute to come within the range of his most delicate methods. In 1924, however, a vista of golden opportunity arose when Miethe and Stammreich announced that they had obtained from pure mercury gold in sufficient yield to be manipulated and determined by chemical means. The vista, although riddled by the barbed arrows of hostile criticism, is still above the horizon, and only the crucial test of further experimentation can decide its ultimate fate. Meanwhile, it may be of service to attempt a brief survey of recent happenings in this very interesting field of alleged transmutation.
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The Present Position of the Transmutation Controversy. Nature 117, 758–760 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/117758a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/117758a0