They led him far, and he found himself grappling with contradictions. The first was the fact that light seems to be an ethereal wave, and yet a bundle of etherless energy. The second was that an atom seems to be a whirling system and yet to vibrate rather than whirl. With these two paradoxes he wrestled mathematically until he felt convinced that the whirling was a reality. As a chemist he would rather see an atom stand still, but as a physicist he was compelled to see it whirl. He so enjoyed this fall from grace and Gratia that on he went, calculating the mutual electromagnetic mass of a simple system, to find out why hydrogen loses weight when it enters a heavier atom. This was by far the hardest job he had ever undertaken, but it gave him an equation that would always express the total mass of a positive and a negative. After that he went ahead with two lines of theory, one concerning the interpenetration of elliptical orbits, one predicting the probable varieties of each atomic species. Of course it was all in the dark, but it was the best sort of discipline. To take an example of his simplest results, he calculated that calcium was forty positives and forty negatives, half of the latter in the sky and half cementing the diminutive sun. Diminutive would seem to be the right word, since it takes six billion billion positives or negatives to make one ampere. Argon, he reckoned, was also forty forty, but its nucleus was more firmly bound, leaving only eighteen planets. Argon was so compact in the middle that nothing could brush an electron off. Calcium, less firmly cemented, would burn in air or join with phosphorus to make bones—like his up at Mezy. He could see in his mind’s eye a laboratory devoted to nothing but these matters—just the testing of these theories by six or eight methods and many new pieces of apparatus. He could see a group of friends keeping at it for years. And other things he fancied. If some lad in his imaginary group chafed under the routine, he might be allowed to explode heavy metals in the hope of securing helium, or coat those metals with radium emanation and then explode them—any device by which the hand of man might chance to deflect the course of nature within the atom. Suppose that the result reduced the estimate of controllable power by one-half, it would nevertheless make America the master of the world, and he believed that she would use such might humanely. In March he wrote it all out, in a paper of great length, not for publication but to free his mind, and sent it on to Grein.