Word: elementalism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Theoretical physics last week again proved that it has substance. The lightest element, hydrogen, has an atomic weight of 1.0078. The helium atom, next lightest in the table of elements, weighs 4.002. Are there no substances in between, with atomic weights of approximately...
...ailing the cattle. It was not alkali disease, said the Department, but selenium poisoning. Selenium is the light-sensitive substance used in photoelectric cells, and is closely related chemically to sulphur. From selenium compounds discovered in the soil of the affected districts, wheat and other plants absorb the poisonous element. The Department's investigators found that if sulphur-harmless alike to plant and consumer-were added to the soil, the plants would absorb that instead of the selenium. Last week Dr. Albert Fred Woods, director of the Department's scientific work, said he was encouraged by the progress...
...erected, not with any notion of permanence, but as a sort of scaffolding to bridge gaps which could not be filled with the instruments and information at hand. Example: splitting the light of distant nebulae in their spectroscopes, astronomers got spectrum lines which they could assign to no known element. Accordingly they created by mutual consent a new element, called it "nebulium," and doubted that it existed. Years later they found "nebulium" to "be their familiar friends oxygen and nitrogen, ionized into unfamiliar atomic states...
...Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1869 the light of the sun's spectacular corona, trapped in spectroscopes during the scant seconds of a total eclipse, has produced on the spectrogram five mysterious bright lines. Astronomers deduced that the corona, though mostly scattered sunlight, was partly self-luminous. What element made it so? Not knowing, they called it "coronium." As recently as last year, in a standard work on eclipses, "coronium" was treated with respect. The Menzel-Boyce report unmasks it as mostly oxygen in bizarre atomic metamorphoses. The normal oxygen atom has eight orbital electrons. Menzel & Boyce proceeded...
...neutral oxygen atom in the high solar atmosphere and under a peculiar state of excitation has been definitely found to coincide with analysis of three of the strongest coronal lines. For years "coronium" a purely hypothetical element, had been considered the cause of the radiations from the sun's corona, just as the light of nebulae was long attributed to the mythical "nebulium...