When William Crookes chose as one of the titles of his paper on the newly discovered properties of electricity, ‘The Fourth State of Matter’, it was to express his belief that he had found a state of matter, additional to the three known ones, which represented ‘the borderland where matter and force seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between known and unknown’ for which his soul had been longing ever since the death of his beloved brother.¹ All that has followed from his discovery, down to the transformation of matter itself into freely working energy, shows that he was right in thinking he had reached some borderland of nature. But the character of the forces which are thus liberated makes it equally clear that this is not the borderland he was looking for. Nature – by which we mean physical nature – has in fact two borders, one touching the realm of the intramaterial energies which are liberated by disrupting the structure of atomic nuclei, the other leading over into creative Chaos, the fountain-head of all that appears in nature as intelligent design.