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28 THE JAINA PHILOSOPHY teracted by cohesive forces which tend to keep it unified This is the secret of the instability of some of the nuclei If the forces of electric repulsion predominate, the nucleus will have a tendency to break-up into two or more parts, the process being known as fission On the contrary of the cohesive forces hold the upper hand not only the nucleus will never break by itself, but will also have a tendency to fuse with other nuclei coming into its contact It is now established that the electric repulsion forces prevail in all heavier nuclei, while the cohesive forces hold the upper hand in the lighter elements approximately upto silver Each proton and neutron in the elements weighs less than it does in the free state, the loss of weight being equal to the energy binding the nucleons This loss becoming progressively greater for the elements in the first half of the atomic table, reaching its maximum in the nucleus of silver After that the loss gets progressively smaller Since each loss of mass manifests itself by the release of energy, it can be seen that to obtain energy from the atoms nucleus requires either the fusion of two elements in the first half of the table or the fission of an element in the second half
However because of the state of metastability, neither the fission nor fusion would occur normally unless something was done to start the process 12 And the process of starting a nuclear reaction is extremely difficult because it needs very high activation energies ATOMIC NUCLEAR ENERGY
We have already observed that matter and energy are two different manifestations of one and the same cosmic cntity instead of being two different entities 12 Please see Chapter III for dexcussion on this powi.
