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ELEMENTS OF ELECTRICITY 429
otherwise the functioning of the equipment remains a mystery. But both theories explain the action of all
ordinary circuits equally well, and this is one of the many reasons for the modern assurance that the old theory is wrong and the new one correct.
The explanations of electrical .actions we will outline are the most recent, and seemingly well founded. They may or may not be true, but they are unquestionably useful. (2) The man who remembers them doesn't have to remember an immense accumulation of details and facts. Very many ot the details he needs in practical work will be found to be small parts of one general theory, which in itself is extremely simple.
Electrons and Atoms
Everything in this world is now7 thought to be comof electricity and something else. What the "something else" is remains to be discovered. From time to time newspapers tell us that another scientist has tried to break open an atom and find out. Whatever it is it is something 1,800 times as heavy as electricity, and it need not bother us any further.
(3) Every physical thing we touch is made up of atoms, (4) and atoms are built of positive and negative electricity, plus this other thing that is 1,800 times as heavy. A hydrogen atom is very simple. It has a core or nucleus in which (according to the latest theory at the time this is written) there is the heavy unknown entity and one positive electron, or "positron." Outside the core, circling around it so fast that it can't be drawn into the core by the attraction of the positron, is one particle of negative electricity, the negative electron, or "negatron."
All other atoms are more complicated. Oxygen, iron, copper and so on have many positrons and negatrons in their cores, or centers, but always more positrons than negatrons. To balance the extra positrons in their centers they need anywhere from two to ninety negatrons outside, circling around just as the one negatron circles around the hydrogen core. These outer negatrons are