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Show Science Is Now World's Biggest News Story f baseballs and marbles. Helium has two marbles buzzing around its baseball and hydrogen has only one. We'd expect that to make helium from hydrogen we'd just join two hydrogen atoms. But atoms aren't like things we know. One and one don't make two, for a very good reason. The helium nucleus (the baseball) base-ball) is four times as heavy as the hydrogen nucleus and so it is therefore made up of four hydrogen hydro-gen nuclei (baseballs). So it takes the baseballs, of four hydrogen atoms and the marbles of two to lot of energy and this must be supplied by splitting up a larger atom the atom of one of the j heavier elements such as uranium I or plutonium. So we must destroy an atom to build an atom. Although it's big news that atomic energy has been released in a bomb, the biggest news will be the discovery of how the hundred hun-dred million horses in the atoms of a glass of water can be used to power the constructive things of life. Some of this power is being be-ing used now, but the biggest things are yet to come. BY WALTER KING JT is your world science is fooling fool-ing around with, but the trouble trou-ble is that scientists can't use simple enough terms for us to understand. un-derstand. Maybe we can figure out in a general way just what is going on with atomic energy, atoms and so forth. An atom a few years ago was the smallest bit of matter that science sci-ence thought existed. But lately that is, within the present lifetime life-time of some of our grandparents scientists have discovered that even atoms are made up of smaller things, like electrons, protons and so forth. And when an atom is broken up these smaller things become energy. Everyone knows what energy is. Energy is power it runs our cars, makes our electric lights burn, heats our food. When a lot of energy is released at once, things begin to happen. An explosion is a sudden release of energy. the central baseball, which is called the nucleus. This nucleus is made up of smaller parts held together by energy. If we split up this nucleus, nu-cleus, this energy is not needed any more and is released as heat, electricity, light or even radio waves. The larger atoms, being more complicated, are more easily broken and so one of the largest the uranium atom was used to make the first atom bombs, which are simply broken atoms from which energy is released. But bomb-making is not the principal value of the atom to science. The experimenters are trying to find a way to make energy do the work that is now done by electric, steam and water power. Someday atoms may run factories. It is possible that they may drive boats and trains, even cars, in the future. LL elements are made up of atoms, which you know as make one helium atom. That leaves two marbles as the remainder. re-mainder. We've seen that when the pieces of an atom have no work to do they become energy, which is pretty hot stuff. So two electrons become energy and that's the principle prin-ciple of the hydrogen bomb. The way the bomb is made is secret, of course, but we know it takes a An ordinary glass of drinking water furnishes power. Usually we use just a tiny bit of this power in our bodies. The water provides chemical energy to keep us alive. But if all the power were turned loose, that glass of water could drive a steamship across the Atlantic. At-lantic. Even a single drop of water wa-ter contains far more energy than a large stick of dynamite. A glass of water contains about 20 million-million-million-million (20 followed by 24 ciphers) hydrogen hydro-gen atoms and half again as many oxygen atoms., Don't worry about the figures just say "an awful lot." gCIENCE isn't sure just how an atom looks, but for our use we can think of it as a baseball with a marble traveling around it, like the moon circles the earth. The marble is held to the baseball (in our atom) by the same force that holds the moon to the earth and the earth to the sun. But the marble is so far from the baseball that all atoms are mostly empty space, not solid as we think of a thing being solid. Most of the atom's weight is in |