"Now, then," we said, spreading our notes on our knee, "go at it. Tell us, and, through us, tell a quarter of a million anxious readers just what all these new discoveries are about."
"The whole thing," said the Professor, warming up to his work as he perceived from the motions of our face and ears our intelligent interest, "is simplicity itself. I can give it to you in a word--"
"That"s it," we said. "Give it to us that way."
"It amounts, if one may boil it down into a phrase--"
"Boil it, boil it," we interrupted.
"Amounts, if one takes the mere gist of it--"
"Take it," we said, "take it."
"Amounts to the resolution of the ultimate atom."
"Ha!" we exclaimed.
"I must ask you first to clear your mind," the Professor continued, "of all conception of ponderable magnitude."
We nodded. We had already cleared our mind of this.
"In fact," added the Professor, with what we thought a quiet note of warning in his voice, "I need hardly tell you that what we are dealing with must be regarded as altogether ultramicroscopic."
We hastened to a.s.sure the Professor that, in accordance with the high standards of honour represented by our journal, we should of course regard anything that he might say as ultramicroscopic and treat it accordingly.
"You say, then," we continued, "that the essence of the problem is the resolution of the atom. Do you think you can give us any idea of what the atom is?"
The Professor looked at us searchingly.
We looked back at him, openly and frankly. The moment was critical for our interview. Could he do it? Were we the kind of person that he could give it to? Could we get it if he did?
"I think I can," he said. "Let us begin with the a.s.sumption that the atom is an infinitesimal magnitude. Very good. Let us grant, then, that though it is imponderable and indivisible it must have a s.p.a.cial content? You grant me this?"
"We do," we said, "we do more than this, we _give_ it to you."
"Very well. If s.p.a.cial, it must have dimension: if dimension--form. Let us a.s.sume _ex hypothesi_ the form to be that of a spheroid and see where it leads us."
The Professor was now intensely interested. He walked to and fro in his laboratory. His features worked with excitement. We worked ours, too, as sympathetically as we could.
"There is no other possible method in inductive science," he added, "than to embrace some hypothesis, the most attractive that one can find, and remain with it--"
We nodded. Even in our own humble life after our day"s work we had found this true.
"Now," said the Professor, planting himself squarely in front of us, "a.s.suming a spherical form, and a s.p.a.cial content, a.s.suming the dynamic forces that are familiar to us and a.s.suming--the thing is bold, I admit--"
We looked as bold as we could.
"a.s.suming that the _ions_, or _nuclei_ of the atom--I know no better word--"
"Neither do we," we said.
"That the nuclei move under the energy of such forces, what have we got?"
"Ha!" we said.
"What have we got? Why, the simplest matter conceivable. The forces inside our atom--itself, mind you, the function of a circle--mark that--"
We did.
"Becomes merely a function of pi!"
The Great Scientist paused with a laugh of triumph.
"A function of pi!" we repeated in delight.
"Precisely. Our conception of ultimate matter is reduced to that of an oblate spheroid described by the revolution of an ellipse on its own minor axis!"
"Good heavens!" we said. "Merely that."
"Nothing else. And in that case any further calculation becomes a mere matter of the extraction of a root."
"How simple," we murmured.
"Is it not," said the Professor. "In fact, I am accustomed, in talking to my cla.s.s, to give them a very clear idea, by simply taking as our root F--F being any finite constant--"
He looked at us sharply. We nodded.
"And raising F to the log of infinity. I find they apprehend it very readily."
"Do they?" we murmured. Ourselves we felt as if the Log of Infinity carried us to ground higher than what we commonly care to tread on.
"Of course," said the Professor, "the Log of Infinity is an Unknown."
"Of course," we said very gravely. We felt ourselves here in the presence of something that demanded our reverence.
"But still," continued the Professor almost jauntily, "we can handle the Unknown just as easily as anything else."
This puzzled us. We kept silent. We thought it wiser to move on to more general ground. In any case, our notes were now nearly complete.
"These discoveries, then," we said, "are absolutely revolutionary."
"They are," said the Professor.
"You have now, as we understand, got the atom--how shall we put it?--got it where you want it."
"Not exactly," said the Professor with a sad smile.
"What do you mean?" we asked.