. The Bell System technical journal . almost as soon as it is made. We thus have here an unstable(radioactive) nucleus—Li^—which does not find stability by ejectingan electron, but instead hastens onward to a completer ruin. In thelower reaches of the Table of the Elements there are so many stableisotopes that the unstable ones can almost always turn themselvesby one electron-emission into one or another of these, and suchcatastrophes are rare. Among the natural radioactive substances inthe upper reaches of the Table they are common, as I now show inreturning to natural radioactivity for the c
. The Bell System technical journal . almost as soon as it is made. We thus have here an unstable(radioactive) nucleus—Li^—which does not find stability by ejectingan electron, but instead hastens onward to a completer ruin. In thelower reaches of the Table of the Elements there are so many stableisotopes that the unstable ones can almost always turn themselvesby one electron-emission into one or another of these, and suchcatastrophes are rare. Among the natural radioactive substances inthe upper reaches of the Table they are common, as I now show inreturning to natural radioactivity for the close of this talk. Notice again Fig. 4, in which the stars are so many and the circlesso few. If arrows were to be inserted to show the transformations,they would crisscross into a maze. I have therefore separated thefigure into three: all of the circles, stars and rosettes in it will be found RADIOACTIVITY—ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL 313 in Fig. 13 (which is really a pair of figures, as the caption says) andFig. 14. 208 212 216 82. Fig. 13—Part of the thorium series of radioactive nuclei. To obtain the actiniumseries, imagine each star and rosette transposed one unit to the left. 206 210 214
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