“When Flammarion wrote this, it was considered very fanciful, but physicists by experimenting with radioactive substances, have discovered many things concerning the atom, which less than thirty years ago they were unable to prove by a single scientific experiment. The atom has always been considered indestructible and indivisible, using Flammarion’s language, “too small for thought”, but the doctrine of the immutability of the atom, which has held sway for almost two thousand years, has ceased to exist. Sir Oliver Lodge says:
“… it is noteworthy how very small these electrical particles (particles smaller than atoms, called ‘electrons’) are compared with the atoms of matter to which they are attached. If an electron is represented by a sphere an inch in diameter, the diameter of an atom of matter on the same scale is a mile and a half. … An atom is not a large thing, but if composed of electrons, the spaces between them are enormous compared with their size – as great relatively as the spaces between the planets in the solar system. And it becomes a reasonable hypothesis to surmise that the whole of the atom may be built up of positive and negative electrons interleaved together. … The oppositely charged electrons are to be thought of in this hypothesis as flying about inside the atom, as a few thousand specks like full stops (periods) might fly about inside this hall forming a kind of cosmic system under their strong mutual forces, and occupying the otherwise empty region of space which we call the atom – occupying it in the same sense that a few scattered but armed soldiers can occupy a territory – occupying it by forceful activity, not by bodily bulk, or according to Lord Kelvin, ‘rotating with inconceivable velocity.’”
The hypothesis of Flammarion and many other eminent scientists, that “the atom may be nothing but a center of force”, seems to have been proved by Professor Rutherford of Montreal. He has shown that the main fact of radioactivity consists in the throwing away with great violence actual atoms of matter, such as may be stopped by a thin sheet of paper. Of this Sir Oliver Lodge says:
“Their speed, indeed, far exceeds that of any cannon ball that ever existed, being as much faster than a cannon ball as that is faster than a snail’s crawl; a hundred times faster than the fastest flying star, these atomic projectiles constitute the fastest moving matter known. There is every reason to believe that a minute scrap of radium, scarcely perceptible to the eye may go on emitting these energetic projectiles for hundreds of years.”
And our experience coincides with Sir Oliver’s: “That whatever hypothesis and speculation we may frame, we cannot exceed the reality in genuine wonder; and believe that the simplicity and beauty of the truth concerning even the material universe, when we know it, will be such as to elicit feelings of reverent awe and adoration.”
Using a very different process of investigation from what these noted physicists have used, we have reached the same conclusion, namely, that what we call matter is, in reality, composed of invisible substance; and what we call the atom is only a tremendous reservoir of energy.”
Hiram Butler
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 