"If we'd only had it when the war was on--imagine half a dozen of us scooting over the enemy batteries and the gunners underneath all at once beginning to shake themselves to pieces! Wow!" His tone was rapturous.
"It's easy enough to explain, Larry," I said.

"The effect, that is--for what the green ray is made of I don't know, of course.

But what it does, clearly, is stimulate atomic vibration to such a pitch that the cohesion between the particles of matter is broken and the body flies to bits--just as a fly-wheel does when its speed gets so great that the particles of which _it_ is made can't hold together." "Shake themselves to pieces is right, then!" he exclaimed.
"Absolutely right," I nodded.

"Everything in Nature vibrates.

And all matter--whether man or beast or stone or metal or vegetable--is made up of vibrating molecules, which are made up of vibrating atoms which are made up of truly infinitely small particles of electricity called electrons, and electrons, the base of all matter, are themselves perhaps only a vibration of the mysterious ether.
"If a magnifying glass of sufficient size and strength could be placed over us we could see ourselves as sieves--our space lattice, as it is called.