(^72) The Secret L!fi fef Nature
managed to locate for them in the Dresden Museum a source of rare
minerals. But when Leadbeater found it distracting to try to make a
detailed clairvoyant examination of each specimen on the spot in the
bustling museum, he discovered another system. He found that at night
he could visit the museum "in one of his subtler bodies" yet still man-
age to dictate his observations to Jinarajadasa as the latter, still in the
physical, took notes and made sketches.
A race was thus triggered between theosophists and orthodox phys-
icists to discover the true nature of matter, the former by delicately
employing their yogic vision, the latter more crudely by bombarding
atoms with parts of atoms.
In 1909 physicist Ernest Rutherford, a big, gruff New Zealander
with a walrus mustache, set the pace in his laboratory in Manchester
when he found that the element radon naturally and spontaneously
emitted particles to which he gave the name "alpha" (later discovered
to be the nucleus of a helium atom bereft of its electron mantle). By
placing a source of alpha particles in a lead case with a narrow hole,
Rutherford was able to aim emitted particles at a piece of very thin
gold foil, which deflected the path of the particles onto a surrounding
wall of zinc sulfide.The zinc sulfide then gave off a flash of light each
time it was struck by an alpha particle.
From this procedure Rutherford was able to deduce that the only
thing that could be knochng the alpha particle off course would have
to be a more massive particle, positively charged, and that this particle
must be the nucleus in each gold atom, occupying a very small volume
in the center of the relatively large atom, actually less than I percent.
For this discovery-that Democritus's solid atom had a hard, separable
nucleus-Rutherford received the 1909 Nobel Prize for physics, along
with the title of baron from a grateful &ng EdwardVII.
Yet Rutherford's nucleus was just what the theosophists had been
viewing for some time with their siddhi powers and describing in great
detail in various publications, although, as later developed, theirs were
actually pairs of nuclei, duplicated by the disturbing act of clairvoyant
observation. In 1908, well before Rutherford proposed his nuclear
model of the atom, and twenty-four years before another physicist,
James Chadwick, actually discovered the neutron-a discovery that led
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(Joyce)
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