Plymouth is the point of departure for one of the book’s defining confrontations between scientific knowledge and political violence. An international scientific society met in England at Plymouth, but the decisive demonstration occurred after its representatives travelled to Hartland Point on the north coast of Devon. There, a young Chinese physicist revealed a means of annihilating matter at a distance; the delegates ordered his instrument and account of the process destroyed, even as an American air fleet came into view.

Setting and Approach

The meeting was convened during the war between Europe and America, while the Americans were mobilizing their armament. A young Chinese physicist had asked to report to a select committee on his experiments in using the energy released through the annihilation of matter. On instruction, forty international representatives travelled to the coast of Devon and assembled on the bare headland of Hartland Point. Plymouth is thus associated with the meeting’s origin, while Hartland Point is the precise setting of the encounter that gives it historical weight.

The text locates the headland in relation to its surroundings: Lundy Island lay eleven miles to the north-west. The gathering’s remote coastal setting contrasts with the scale of what was at stake. The delegates were not simply hearing a theoretical report; they had been summoned to witness a technology whose consequences reached beyond the scientific society and into the ongoing war.

The Demonstration

The society’s president announced that the use of subatomic energy had been achieved and that a demonstration would follow. The physicist produced an instrument resembling an old-fashioned rifle. He explained that it could initiate the annihilation of matter at a distance and in a precise direction, and could also inhibit the process. As a weapon, he presented it as an effectively complete means of destruction; as a source of power, he argued, it could provide energy for constructive human work without limit.

His stated hope was that placing this capacity in the hands of organized intelligence would end human conflict. He proposed that the scientific society use the instrument to stop the war, and that a further device, not yet perfected, could distribute industrial power wherever it was needed. The promise of universal benefit was inseparable from the means of absolute destruction: the same instrument that might halt a battle could make its custodians masters of the planet.

The Vote and the Approaching Fleet

The delegates considered whether the instrument should be used. The meeting voted unanimously to order both the device and every account of its operation destroyed, while recording its respect for the physicist. The decision treated control of the knowledge as a responsibility, not as an entitlement conferred by scientific expertise. The physicist, after standing silently with the instrument, accepted the ruling and spoke of the ten years of work embodied in it and his disappointment at being denied the gratitude he had expected.

The scene turns abruptly from deliberation to military pressure. Looking west through a field-glass, the physicist identified the approaching aircraft as American. The representatives crowded to the windows and saw a line of aircraft extending north and south. An English delegate urged him to use the instrument, fearing for England after the allied air force had apparently been defeated across the Atlantic. The account ends this moment with the demand and the visible fleet; it does not establish that the device was used at Hartland Point.

The Secret’s Institutional Afterlife

The book later presents the knowledge associated with the Discoverer as a guarded secret within scientific circles. The International College of Science restricted membership through examinations and high fees; membership conferred the title of Scientist, permission to experiment, and access to many lucrative posts. Members were also said to be bound to keep certain technical secrets, and rumours circulated that a scientist who disclosed one had mysteriously died. This later institutional setting makes the decision at Hartland Point resonate beyond the meeting itself: the scientific community that refused immediate possession of world-dominating power is subsequently portrayed as a closed corporation that guards knowledge from the public.

In a later period, religious and scientific institutions were formally joined. The International College of Science was asked to nominate scientists for a church-sanctioned Sacred Order of Scientists, whose members would be maintained at public expense and charged with research into the worship of Gordelpus. The narrative does not return to Plymouth, but it shows how scientific authority and religious power could become bound together. Against that later history, the meeting associated with Plymouth stands as an early test of whether scientific custody of a destructive secret could remain an act of restraint rather than a claim to rule.