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Frederick Soddy: The Scientist as Prophet – Professor Mansel Davies [May 1991]

The next Soddy volume of significance was one in the Home University Library – Matter and energy. ….. the following quotations are certainly worthy of note, and especially in relation to their 1912 date.

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Atoms of matter are regarded as attracting or repelling one another with the force of chemical affinity, a phrase which makes every thinking man shudder... It is contrary to the spirit of modern science to imagine the existence of causes which in reality are names only, and which throw no light at all on the effects they are supposed to explain.

[Aggregation – the forces of repulsion and attraction/gravity]

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The key to further progress is the answer to the question, 'What is positive electricity?'... One cannot but feel that the answer for this question underlies the secret to the structure of matter and that, the expression 'positive electricity' is but a mere term cloaking total ignorance of the essential character of the structure the electrical theory of matter attempts to explain.

[function, function dependency]

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The common elements are merely elements which are not changing, but there is the strongest reason to believe that many of them, if they could be changed into simpler forms, would give out supplies of energy no less remarkable than that furnished by the radio-elements.

[Form, function, platonic solids, form and geometry]

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The transformation of the uranium into helium and, presumably, lead must be carried out in an artificial manner before the energy of the process becomes practicably available ... One of the most likely processes to affect the rate of transformation of a radioactive substance would be the bombardment to which it is itself subjected by the helium atoms expelled by those of its atoms actually breaking up... Possibly the difficulties in the way of transformation may prove less formidable than now appears.

[Form, function, platonic solids, form and geometry]

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... the problem of artificial transmutation will in future come to be regarded, no longer in the light it was a few years ago, as an impossible chimera surviving from the discreditable epoch in which the science of chemistry originated, [i.e., alchemy] but as the final phase of the age-long conflict of interests between Nature and Man.

[Form, function, platonic solids, form and geometry]