Or
as Professor Planck said in his Columbia lectures, we are not entitled
to hope that we shall ever be able to represent truly through any
physical formulae the internal structure of the atom.
[Footnote 2: _Nature_, April 5, 1917.]
III
2. We must now take up the second phase of our subject, the problem of
the origin of matter.
Before we knew anything of radioactivity we could have dismissed such a
subject briefly by quoting the law of the conservation of matter, which
says that matter can neither be created nor destroyed by any means known
to science. By our knowledge of radioactivity we can make our answer a
little more learned, a little less abrupt, but none the less
discouraging to the advocate of the development hypothesis. We can tell
how the elements of high atomic weight, such as uranium and thorium, are
constantly giving off particles and are thus by loss or decomposition
being changed over into other elements, such as radium, niton, polonium
and lead. But our new knowledge compels us ultimately to give the same
answer as before, namely, that _we still do not know how matter ever
could have originated_, except that "in the beginning" it was called
into existence by the fiat of Him whom we Christians worship as our God,
the Creator.
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