A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford (Great Discoveries) by Richard Reeves

Author:Richard Reeves [Reeves, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Rutherford finished out the 1919 school year at Manchester, packed up the apparatus to continue the proton experiments, and took on the most prestigious position in British physics: Cavendish. It was a triumphant homecoming for the boy from New Zealand who had first walked through the soot-colored arch on Free School Lane as a colonial scholar twenty-four years before. He was greeted there at a festive dinner by students singing, arms crossed, in the wacky way of their old tribe:

We’ve a professor

A jolly smart professor,

Who’s director of the lab in Free School Lane,

He’s quite an acquisition

To the cause of erudition,…

When he first did arrive here,

He made everything alive here,

For, said he, the place will never do at all;

I’ll make it nice and tidy,

And I’ll hire a Cambridge “lidy”

Just to sweep the cobwebs from the wall

And what he’s been achieving

Would be almost past believing

If he weren’t quite a marvel among men…

What’s in an atom,

The innermost substratum?

That’s the problem he’s working on today.

He lately did discover

How to shoot them down like plover,

And the poor little things can’t get away.

He uses as munitions

On his hunting expeditions

Alpha particles which out of Radium spring.

It’s really most surprising

And it needed some devising,

How to shoot down an atom on the wing.1

The dust and cobwebs did look as if they had been growing there since Cavendish opened in 1871. But buildings and cleanup were at best a part-time fashion for Rutherford. Marcus Oliphant, the young Australian who arrived in 1927, described the director’s office: “I entered a small office littered with papers, the desk cluttered in a manner which I had been taught at school indicated an untidy and inefficient mind…It was raining and drops of rain ran reluctantly down the grime-covered glass of the uncurtained window…I was received genially by a large, rather florid man with thinning fair hair and a large moustache, who reminded me forcibly of the keeper of the general store and post office in a little village in the hills behind Adelaide…Rutherford made me feel welcome and at ease at once. He spluttered a little as he talked, from time to time holding a match to a pipe which produced smoke and ash like a volcano.”2

Cavendish was, and had been for a very long time, a very old-fashioned place. The greatest change since Rutherford had first arrived there in 1895 was the number of students. There were six hundred now, almost half of them research students needing laboratory room and time, overcrowding the place. The numbers were driven up by veterans (two hundred of them Americans), many trying to catch up with their lives, returning to school after years of war. Rutherford immediately rejected the suggestion that the number could be reduced by refusing admission to women—not too tough a decision for a man who had worked with Marie Curie and her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, and with the great Austrian physicist Lise Meitner.* On December 6, 1920, Rutherford and William J. Pope, the chemistry professor, cosigned a letter to The Times of

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