Ernest Rutherford

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

by Richard Rhodes  · 17 Sep 2012  · 1,437pp  · 384,709 words

of new developments. The nuclei of some light atoms could be shattered by bombarding them with atomic particles; that much the great British experimental physicist Ernest Rutherford had already demonstrated. Rutherford used one nucleus to bombard another, but since both nuclei were strongly positively charged, the bombarded nucleus repelled most attacks. Physicists

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to world salvation. On February 27, 1932, in a letter to the British journal Nature, physicist James Chadwick of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory, announced the possible existence of a neutron. (He confirmed the neutron’s existence in a longer paper in the Proceedings of the Royal

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Without question Szilard read The Times of September 12, with its provocative sequence of headlines: THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION BREAKING DOWN THE ATOM TRANSFORMATION OF ELEMENTS Ernest Rutherford, The Times reported, had recited a history of “the discoveries of the last quarter of a century in atomic transmutation,” including: THE NEUTRON NOVEL TRANSFORMATIONS

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came in chemistry. The great surprises in basic science in the first half of the twentieth century would come in physics. * * * In 1895, when young Ernest Rutherford roared up out of the Antipodes to study physics at the Cavendish with a view to making his name, the New Zealand he left behind

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is accomplished. Hereafter Rutherford’s healthy ambition will go to scientific honors, not commercial success. It seems probable that J. J. Thomson sat eager young Ernest Rutherford down in the darkly paneled rooms of the Gothic Revival Cavendish Laboratory that Clerk Maxwell had founded, at the university where Newton wrote his great

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the glow on the screen but in dark shadow he could see its bones. Röntgen’s discovery intrigued other researchers besides J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. The Frenchman Henri Becquerel was a third-generation physicist who, like his father and grandfather before him, occupied the chair of physics at the Musée

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Oxford man at McGill, Frederick Soddy, of talent sufficient eventually to earn a Nobel Prize. “At the beginning of the winter [of 1900],” Soddy remembers, “Ernest Rutherford, the Junior Professor of Physics, called on me in the laboratory and told me about the discoveries he had made. He had just returned with

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David Bohr, the Danish theoretical physicist.189 He was then twenty-seven years old. 3 TVi “There came into the room a slight-looking boy,” Ernest Rutherford’s McGill colleague and biographer A. S. Eve recalls of Manchester days, “whom Rutherford at once took into his study.190, 191 Mrs. Rutherford explained

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doubt it did. The dome took the form of a giant Pickelhaube, the comic-opera spiked helmet that the Kaiser and his soldiers wore. Leaving Ernest Rutherford in Montreal in 1906 Hahn had moved to Berlin to work with Emil Fischer at the university. Fischer was an organic chemist who knew little

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loose statement of fact to pass unchallenged.303 When he stopped work long enough to take tea at the laboratory he even managed to inhibit Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford’s other “boys” called him “Papa.” Moseley respected the boisterous laureate but certainly never honored him with any such intimacy; he rather thought Rutherford

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his commission as a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers ahead of the waiting list. * * * Chaim Weizmann, the tall, sturdy, Russian-born Jewish biochemist who was Ernest Rutherford’s good friend at Manchester, was a passionate Zionist at a time when many, including many influential British Jews, believed Zionism to be at least

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Hevesy tried Budapest in 1903 before going to the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in 1904 and on to work with Fritz Haber and then with Ernest Rutherford; Szilard had studied at the Technology Institute in Budapest and served in the Army before the post-Armistice turmoil made him decide to leave. In

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one wanted to be an apprentice.”460 He learned much of physics, but haphazardly. He graduated a chemist and was foolhardy enough to imagine that Ernest Rutherford would welcome him at Cambridge, where the Manchester physicist had moved in 1919 to take over direction of the Cavendish from the aging J. J

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not throw dice? “Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world.”502 6 Machines After the war, under Ernest Rutherford’s direction, the Cavendish thrived. Robert Oppenheimer suffered there largely because he was not an experimentalist; for experimental physicists, Cambridge was exactly the center that

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, with a scintillation screen mounted on one end. For an alpha source he used a beveled brass disk coated with a radium compound: Arrangement of Ernest Rutherford’s experiment: D, alpha source. S, zinc sulfide scintillation screen. M, microscope. The likeliest explanation for Marsden’s anomalous H atoms was contamination; hydrogen is

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hydrogen. . . . If this be the case, we must conclude that the nitrogen atom is disintegrated.”510 Newspapers soon published the discovery in plainer words: Sir Ernest Rutherford, headlines blared in 1919, had split the atom. It was less a split than a transmutation, the first artificial transmutation ever achieved. When an alpha

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would go to any amount of trouble to make their acquaintance, but he didn’t like dogs of the barking kind.”521 Although Aston respected Ernest Rutherford enormously, the Cavendish director’s great boom must ever have been a trial. * * * The United States led the way in particle acceleration. The American mechanical

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. It seems he was cut out for other work: for now, building that school of theoretical physics he had dreamed of. * * * On June 3, 1920, Ernest Rutherford delivered the Bakerian Lecture before the Royal Society of London.558 It was the second time he had been invited to fill the distinguished lectureship

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do something.”710 The busy economist required very little prodding. Szilard followed him to London and on a weekend at Cambridge in May Beveridge convinced Ernest Rutherford to head an Academic Assistance Council. The council announced itself on May 22, proposing “to provide a clearing house and centre of information” and to

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in London below Kensington Gardens. Einstein was the featured speaker and therefore all the hall’s ten thousand seats were filled and the aisles crowded. Ernest Rutherford came down from Cambridge to chair the event. Afterward Einstein packed his bags and left for America, joining his wife on the Westernland when it

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-drop model proved useful, however, and Frisch in Copenhagen and Meitner in Berlin, among others, took it to heart. * * * One fine October Thursday in 1937 Ernest Rutherford, a vigorous sixty-six, went out into the garden of his house on the green Cambridge Backs to trim a tree. He took a bad

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age, he might have said something similar of Rutherford and the realm of the infinitely small; for Rutherford was the Newton of atomic physics.863 Ernest Rutherford unknowingly wrote his own more characteristic epitaph in a letter to A. S. Eve from his country cottage on the first day of that last

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earned his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1903 working with thorium, he had studied under Max Planck at the University of Berlin and corresponded with Ernest Rutherford when Rutherford was still progressing in fruitful exile at McGill. Pegram was tall and athletic, a champion at tennis well into his sixties, a canoeist

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Lawrence had measured the prevailing American skepticism and conservatism against the increasing enthusiasm of his British friends and responded with characteristic fervor. Ralph H. Fowler, Ernest Rutherford’s widower son-in-law, had visited Berkeley during the 1930s and attended picnics and weekend parties with the inventor of the cyclotron. Fowler was

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Japanese atomic bomb. The committee included Nishina, who was forthwith elected chairman. An elderly appointee was Hantarō Nagaoka, whose Saturnian atomic model had nearly anticipated Ernest Rutherford’s planetary model in the early years of the century. The Navy committee met first on July 8 with the Navy’s chief technical officers

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discovery in a cable to the Physical Review.1 Flerov had attended an international meeting of scientists in Moscow in October and heard Peter Kapitza, Ernest Rutherford’s protege, when asked what scientists could do to help the war effort, respond in part: In recent years a new possibility—nuclear energy—has

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scientific laboratory in a barren desert.”2370 Bainbridge was well qualified. From Cooperstown, New York, the son of a wholesale stationer, he had worked under Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish and had designed and built the Harvard cyclotron that now served the Manhattan Project’s purposes on the Hill. He had brought

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. The elements they first isolated from pitchblende residues, polonium and radium, radiated far more energy than any chemical process could account for. 4. New Zealander Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus. James Jeans called him “the Newton of atomic physics.” C. 1902. 5. The Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, the world center

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neutrons. Here Lawrence examines the vacuum chamber of the 37-inch machine, completed in 1937. 25. Two distinguished Cavendish directors: J. J. Thomson (left) and Ernest Rutherford in the 1930s. 26. Mathematician John von Neumann departed Europe early for a lifetime appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study. 27. Leo Szilard, photographed

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. Chapter 1: Moonshine 1. September 12, 1933: I derive this date from Leo Szilard’s statement at Szilard (1972), p. 529, that he read about Ernest Rutherford’s speech to the British Association “one morning . . . in the newspapers” and “that day . . . was walking down Southampton Row.” The British Association story appeared prominently

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corrupted”: quoted in Eve (1939), p. 388. 807. “which was . . . experiments”: Weart and Szilard (1978), p. 20. 808. Szilard applied to Rutherford: cf. LS to Ernest Rutherford, June 7, 1934, Szilard Papers. 809. “These experiments . . . confirmed”: Weart and Szilard (1978), p. 20. 810. the problem with helium: cf. Brown (n.d.), p

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L. 1982. The End of the Alliance. University of North Carolina Press. Middlebrook, Martin. 1980. The Battle of Hamburg. Allen Lane. Moon, P. B. 1974. Ernest Rutherford and the Atom. Priory Press. ——. 1977. George Paget Thompson. Biog. Mem. F. R. S. 23:529. Moore, Ruth. 1966. Niels Bohr. Knopf. Moorehead, Alan. 1956

The Elements of Marie Curie

by Dava Sobel  · 20 Aug 2024  · 346pp  · 96,466 words

he and Marie had accomplished to date, while also acknowledging the work of others whose insights and projects were expanding the general understanding of radioactivity. Ernest Rutherford, for example, a young New Zealander studying under J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, discovered through experiments with uranium that uranic rays

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a racehorse with my name.” In the scientific journals, radioactivity rattled the foundations of physics and called concepts such as “atom” and “element” into question. Ernest Rutherford, who had moved from the Cavendish Laboratory to McGill University in Canada, conducted experiments with a new colleague there and proposed that radioactive atoms changed

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of Roentgen’s experiments, discovered uranic rays in 1896. That same year, J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, along with his student Ernest Rutherford, demonstrated that X-rays split the air into electrically charged ions, allowing electric current to flow. Continuing alone, Rutherford showed that uranic rays did the

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personnel, but, just before the start of the fall 1906 semester, she agreed to accept a young woman who had once worked as assistant to Ernest Rutherford. The newcomer, Canadian-born Harriet Brooks, arrived in Paris bringing several years’ experience in radioactivity research. She was thirty years old, unemployed for the first

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, only Harriet and her younger sister Elizabeth managed—by striving and by seizing every scholarship opportunity—to attend university. Harriet Brooks (back row, center) and Ernest Rutherford (far right) with other physicists at McGill University, ca. 1899 Wikimedia Commons In autumn of 1900, soon after Rutherford returned to campus from New Zealand

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a solid residue on the walls of its container. The residue also proved radioactive, though its activity dissipated quickly, within minutes. On May 23, 1901, Ernest Rutherford and Harriet Brooks reported their “new gas from radium” to the Royal Society of Canada. Mindful that their findings smacked of alchemy, they did not

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rivalry, making Mme. Curie the envy of her peers. Other researchers coveted her mother lode of radium. Boltwood, for example, in a 1904 letter to Ernest Rutherford, reported rumors of “wild scientific orgies” at the Curie lab, featuring obscene amounts of radium bromide. In 1908 Boltwood jealously eyed radium stores in Austria

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these days as France’s newest Nobel laureate in physics, cited for his color photography process. The 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry had gone to Ernest Rutherford, in recognition of his insight into the radioactive transformation of elements. As a physics professor, Rutherford was amused by his own sudden “transformation from physicist

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measured repeatedly over the years. Pierre had determined 3.99 days as the time required for any quantity of the material to diminish by half. Ernest Rutherford later shortened that figure to 3.71 days, and recently researchers in America and Europe had recorded intermediate values of 3.88, 3.86, and

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. The event drew five hundred physicists, chemists, and medical doctors from all parts of the world. These eminent men of science included every radioactivist from Ernest Rutherford and Bertram Boltwood to Stefan Meyer of the new Viennese Radium Institute, which was due to open in just a few weeks. On the first

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these achievements, the scholarship committee agreed to support her research for another year, which she arranged to spend back home in England—at Manchester, with Ernest Rutherford. Marie decamped briefly in July to collaborate with Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at his cryogenic laboratory in Leiden. Only there could she expand her

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conference table in the Hotel Metropole. Marie and Paul were flanked by their friends and countrymen Jean Perrin and Henri Poincaré, as well as by Ernest Rutherford and James Jeans from England, plus a dozen other researchers of equal repute, including the thirty-two-year-old Albert Einstein, a professor of theoretical

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in Physics. First Solvay Council, Brussels, 1911: Mme. Curie confers at table with Henri Poincaré; Jean Perrin leans his head on his hand beside her. Ernest Rutherford stands directly behind her, with James Jeans to his right and, to his left, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Albert Einstein, and Paul Langevin. Founder Ernest Solvay

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years in the shed. As Pierre always did, she named the other scientists who had made essential contributions to the study of radioactivity: Henri Becquerel, Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Soddy, William Ramsay, André Debierne. She credited Rutherford in particular with establishing “a backbone for the new science, in the form of a very

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herself. Even if she were reimbursed for the expense, she would still wish to keep the standard near her. She had said as much to Ernest Rutherford when she saw him in Brussels at the Solvay Council in the fall. As the two of them talked privately, late into the night, she

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of fabricating the standard had likewise come about unofficially, through personal contacts. When the question of cost first arose, at the 1910 congress in Belgium, Ernest Rutherford had thought of appealing to government stakeholders for funding. Going that route, however, would have invited the intrusion of government bureaucrats into the committee’s

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, partly as a show of friendship, and partly “to smooth things over” in case her feelings had been bruised in discussions of the radium standard, Ernest Rutherford entreated the University of Manchester to grant her an honorary degree. He had intended to make the presentation at the formal opening of his new

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eleven weeks and then at fourteen, and the cleveite according to a different schedule. In April Ellen took the train to Washington, DC, to hear Ernest Rutherford inaugurate a prestigious lecture series at the National Academy of Sciences. He had recently been knighted in the 1914 New Year’s honors. Unfortunately, Ellen

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and the English Channel—two bodies of water now menaced by German submarines. All Allied attempts at anti-submarine warfare had failed thus far, but Ernest Rutherford in England and Paul Langevin in France were determined to develop means for detecting these vessels by sound. Paul had begun experimenting with acoustic apparatus

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English and American naval authorities, to avoid anyone’s duplication of efforts. The first such inter-Allied meeting took place in Paris in May. When Ernest Rutherford arrived, Marie toured him through the new Radium Institute. Hers was the only building in the city surrounded by walls of stacked sandbags, installed by

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-ray techniques to reveal precisely how many positively charged particles existed in the nuclei of individual atoms. A clear connection existed between this tally, which Ernest Rutherford dubbed “atomic number,” and atomic weight, because the elements stayed put where Mendeleev had placed them. But atomic numbers represented a feature more fundamental than

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biologist Kristine Bonnevie. Although the radioactivity text that Ellen wrote with Eva Ramstedt was published in Norwegian, she sent autographed copies to Mme. Curie and Ernest Rutherford as soon as the book came out. Madame simply thanked her. Sir Ernest quipped, “I regret to say that I do not know your language

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visited Frederick Soddy in his new lab at Oxford University. Soddy had spent his undergraduate years at Oxford, before heading to McGill, where he and Ernest Rutherford uncovered “the new alchemy” of radioactive transmutation that made their reputations. His current mission at Oxford was to build a research school in radioactivity, as

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Canadian Club of Montreal—and having traveled twice to Europe on scholarships—she joined the federation’s Canadian branch. Harriet had last seen her mentor Ernest Rutherford in 1914, on his way back from a family reunion in New Zealand and the British Association meeting in Australia. On that occasion, Mary Rutherford

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the burn on Pierre’s arm as manageable risks of exploring the unknown. Nor were the Curies alone in their disregard for radium’s dangers. Ernest Rutherford once lost a tube of radium salt on the train between Montreal and Ottawa, and casually estimated that the tube would continue releasing radium emanation

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great falls of Niagara and of the magnificent colors of the Grand Canyon” to keep both vivid in her mind. In a lengthy letter to Ernest Rutherford, Bertram Boltwood reported on his meetings with Marie in the United States. I saw the Madame first at a luncheon given in her honor in

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global radioactivity community. By 1930, half a dozen secondaries had been prepared in Vienna, tested in Paris, and exported with certificates signed by Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, and Stefan Meyer, officers of the International Commission for the Radium Standard. Marie personally tested the first few secondaries, by comparing their degree of gamma

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and Curie family friend Jean Perrin to deliver their news to the Académie des Sciences. Chapter Twenty-Eight WILLY (Beryllium) “I DON’T BELIEVE IT,” Ernest Rutherford told his Cavendish crew upon reading the report in the Comptes rendus by the team of Curie and Joliot. Of course he trusted the couple

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sits near the center with Chairman Paul Langevin to her left. Lise Meitner is seated second from right, with James Chadwick to her left and Ernest Rutherford four places to her right. Wikimedia Commons Lise Meitner, who had undertaken similar experiments, spoke up first to object to the French team’s idea

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received this citation along with 200,000 francs and a gold medal naming her the 1911 Nobel laureate in chemistry. UtCon Collection / Alamy Stock Photo Ernest Rutherford, 1908 Nobelist in chemistry Wikimedia Commons André Debierne, discoverer of actinium Musée Curie (coll. ACJC) Bertram Boltwood, radiochemist at Yale History and Art Collection / Alamy

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July 1876 in Exeter, Ontario; m. Frank Pitcher 1907; d. 17 April 1933 in Montreal, after a long but unspecified illness. An obituary written by Ernest Rutherford and published in Nature recalled how well known she had been in the years 1901 to 1905 “for her contributions to the then youthful science

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worked on the Manhattan Project and at both the Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories; d. 1981 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at age ninety-one. Ernest Rutherford b. 30 August 1871 at Brightwater, near Nelson, New Zealand; m. Mary Georgina Newton of Christchurch in 1900; d. 19 October 1937 in Cambridge, England

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the large surplus of funds raised for the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace. The scholarships, which are still awarded today, also enabled the young Ernest Rutherford to leave New Zealand in 1895 for the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Chapter 11 The Académie des Sciences was established in 1666. By 1910, full membership

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websites credit German physicist Friedrich Ernst Dorn with the discovery of radon (Rn). Dorn himself, however, never claimed that distinction, which in fact belongs to Ernest Rutherford and the Curies. It was Rutherford who gave the name “emanation” to the gases given off by radioelements. Thorium emanation, radium emanation, and actinium emanation

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Frederick Soddy all worked on the problem. Later they argued with each other over credit for the discovery. When asked to reconcile the conflicting claims, Ernest Rutherford said, “I personally feel that the whole question is a very tangled one, for nearly all the people concerned have talked over the matter … The

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.” Two committees, one administrative and the other scientific, directed the foundation’s activities. Mme. Curie served on the International Scientific Committee along with Hendrik Lorentz, Ernest Rutherford, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, and five others. Although Solvay envisioned a thirty-year lifespan for his physics institute, his heirs recognized its value and extended its

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recognition of the “Compton effect,” i.e. the lengthening of wavelengths of photons scattered by collisions with electrons. Chapter 30 Geiger counters, first conceived by Ernest Rutherford and Hans Geiger at Manchester in 1908 and later refined by Geiger’s collaboration with Walther Müller, entered the Curie lab in January 1933, when

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the Gallica website. Chapter 7 Marie’s first lecture at the Sorbonne is quoted in Obsessive Genius by Barbara Goldsmith. Harriet Brooks’s letters to Ernest Rutherford are held in the Rutherford Collection of Correspondence at the Cambridge University Library. The conversation between Rutherford and Soddy in the privacy of the McGill

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lab to lab in her article for Kvinnelige Studenter 1882–1932, quoted in Lykknes et al, “Ellen Gleditsch: Pioneer Woman.” Bertram Boltwood’s correspondence with Ernest Rutherford is collected and edited by Lawrence Badash in Rutherford and Boltwood: Letters on Radioactivity. Hertha Ayrton’s letter to her daughter, Barbara, is quoted in

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study of the letters as printed convinced her, as she noted in Marie Curie: A Life, “that they are in fact genuine excerpts.” Chapter 11 Ernest Rutherford’s letter to Bertram Boltwood following the Brussels congress appears in Badash’s collection of Letters on Radioactivity. Marie’s letter to Paul Langevin is

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Center for History of Science, is also quoted in Quinn. Marie’s 1911 acceptance speech can be read on the Nobel Prize website. Chapter 13 Ernest Rutherford’s letters to Bertram Boltwood regarding his opinion of Mme. Curie and his trip to Paris for the comparison of radium standards appear in the

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Ève Curie’s biography. Stefan Meyer’s description of postwar privations in Vienna appears in A. S. Eve’s Rutherford: Being the Life and Letters. Ernest Rutherford’s June 14, 1919, thank-you note to Ellen Gleditsch is quoted in Kubanek. Marie’s August 1 letter to Ellen is in the National

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in Lettres. Marie’s letters to Ève from Geneva, to Irène from Rome, and from Irène in the mountains also appear in Lettres. Chapter 28 Ernest Rutherford’s disbelief regarding the Paris findings on gamma radiation was reported by physicist Pierre Radvanyi, a former student of Frédéric Joliot, and science historian Monique

Collider

by Paul Halpern  · 3 Aug 2009  · 279pp  · 75,527 words

of sledgehammer and the steadiest of arms to wield it. 3 Striking Gold Rutherford ’s Scattering Experiments Now I know what the atom looks like! —ERNEST RUTHERFORD, 1911 In a remote farming region of the country the Maoris call Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud, a young settler was digging

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little chance of striking gold—unlike other parts of New Zealand, his region didn’t have much—he was nevertheless destined for a golden future. Ernest Rutherford, who would become the first to split open the atom, was born to a family of early New Zealand settlers. His grandfather, George Rutherford, a

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River valley. There, George’s son James, a flax maker, married an English settler named Martha, who gave birth to Ernest on August 30, 1871. Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), the father of nuclear physics. Attending school in Nelson and university at Canterbury College in Christchurch, the largest and most English city on

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of power. We require too an exhausted tube capable of withstanding this voltage . . . I see no reason why such a requirement cannot be made practical. —ERNEST RUTHERFORD (SPEECH AT THE OPENING OF THE METROPOLITAN-VICKERS HIGH TENSION LABORATORY, MANCHESTER, ENGLAND, 1930) The Soviet People’s Commissariat of Education issued its coveted stamp

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, 1983), p. 62. 3 J. J. Thomson, Recollections and Reflections (New York: Macmillan, 1937), pp. 138-139. 4 Ernest Rutherford to Mary Newton, August 1896, in Wilson, Rutherford, Simple Genius, pp. 122-123. 5 Ernest Rutherford to Mary Newton, February 21, 1896, in ibid., p. 68. 6 Thomson, Recollections and Reflections, p. 341. 7

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Arthur S. Eve, in Lawrence Badash, “The Importance of Being Ernest Rutherford,” Science 173 (September 3, 1971): 871. 8 Chaim Weizmann, Trial and

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Error (New York: Harper & Bros., 1949), p. 118. 9 Ibid. 10 Ernest Rutherford, “The Development of the Theory of Atomic Structure,” in Joseph Needham and Walter Pagel, eds., Background to Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p.

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68. 11 Ibid. 12 Ernest Rutherford to B. Boltwood, December 14, 1910, in L. Badash, Rutherford and Boltwood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 235. 13

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Ernest Rutherford to Niels Bohr, March 20, 1913, in Niels Bohr, Collected Works, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1972), p. 583. 14 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond:

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

by Graham Farmelo  · 24 Aug 2009  · 1,396pp  · 245,647 words

-smelling laboratories, Dirac learned how to investigate systematically how chemicals behave and learned that all matter is made of atoms. The famous Cambridge scientist Sir Ernest Rutherford gave an idea of the smallness of atoms by pointing out that if everyone in the world spent twelve hours a day placing individual atoms

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the most powerful influences on him. There was no love lost between Eddington and the other great figure of Cambridge science, the New Zealand-born Ernest Rutherford. The two men had sharply contrasting personalities and diametrically opposed approaches to physics. Whereas Eddington was introspective, mild-mannered and fond of mathematical abstraction, Rutherford

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. Rutherford was as down to earth and, at the same time, as snobbish as anyone in science. As the recorder of the dinner wrote: Sir Ernest Rutherford ‘deplored the writing of popular books by men who had been serious scientists, to satisfy the craving for the mysterious exhibited by the public’.49

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awarded to Bohr in December 1931, whereupon Bohr and his family moved in during the summer of 1932. The Bohrs’ first sleeping-over guests were Ernest Rutherford and his wife, who stayed there from 12 September to 22 September 1932. I thank Finn Aaserud and Felicity Pors for this information. 48 Parry

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awarded to Bohr in December 1931, whereupon Bohr and his family moved in during the summer of 1932. The Bohrs’ first sleeping-over guests were Ernest Rutherford and his wife, who stayed there from 12 September to 22 September 1932. I thank Finn Aaserud and Felicity Pors for this information. 48 Parry

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet

by Arthur Turrell  · 2 Aug 2021  · 297pp  · 84,447 words

owe a great debt to the person who did more than anyone else to show the world this was possible. That person is the physicist Ernest Rutherford, who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, discovered the structure of the atom, carried out the first nuclear reaction (without realizing it), and

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. But even the first ever artificial fusion experiment performed by Rutherford would show that achieving net energy gain was going to be very, very hard. Ernest Rutherford was a brilliant, innovative, and hardworking physicist whose character and creativity won him many successes throughout his career. He helped to develop an early form

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from fast moving traffic than you would from stationary traffic.I This interaction between light and electrons is called Thomson scattering after J. J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford’s first boss in the UK.3 Unlike the National Ignition Facility, JET only uses lasers to diagnose what’s going on during experiments. The

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radioactive isotopes, including carbon-14.9 Radioactive substances can also be found in the earth, and the early radioactivity pioneers, such as Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford, did their first experiments on these. These ores originally come from outer space and were created in supernovae. You may wonder how, if these atoms

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Founder of Nuclear Science and of Some Developments Based on His Work,” Proceedings of the Physical Society 78 (1961): 1083–115; R. H. Cragg, “Lord Ernest Rutherford of Nelson (1871–1937),” Royal Institute of Chemistry Reviews 4 (1971): 129–45; M. Kumar, “The Man Who Went Nuclear: How

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Ernest Rutherford Ushered in the Atomic Age,” Independent (2011), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-man-who-went-nuclear-how-ernest-rutherford-ushered-in-the-atomic-age-2230533.html; J. K. Laylin, Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, 1901

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52 (2012): 043004. 7. M. Claessens, ITER: The Giant Fusion Reactor: Bringing a Sun to Earth (London: Springer Nature, 2019). 8. R. H. Cragg, “Lord Ernest Rutherford of Nelson (1871–1937),” Royal Institute of Chemistry, Review 4 (1971): 129–45; E. Rutherford and T. Royds, “XXI. The Nature of the α Particle

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation

by David Bodanis  · 25 May 2009  · 349pp  · 27,507 words

story fades from the book, and in- preface stead we pick up with other physicists: more empirical ones now, such as the booming, rugby-playing Ernest Rutherford, and the quiet, ex-POW James Chadwick, who together helped reveal the detailed structures within the atom that could—in principle—be manipulated to allow

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they were something like tough and shiny ball bearings: mighty glowing entities that no one could see inside. It was only with the research of Ernest Rutherford, a great, booming bear of a man working at England’s Manchester University, in the period around 1910, that anyone got a clearer view. Rutherford

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the first clear glimpse of the inside of atoms was, to a large extent, because his heightened awareness of dis- 93 2 the early years Ernest Rutherford photograph by c. e. wynn-williams. aip emilio segrè visual archives crimination made him the kindest leader of men. The bluff booming exterior was just

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—regularly attended some of his first classes, so that the authorities would be less likely to notice how few other students Einstein was then getting. ernest rutherford died suddenly in 1937, following an intestinal rupture, which was possibly linked to overvigorous gardening he was doing at his weekend cottage. His final words

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great pleasure, in 1947 he was offered a named professorship at Cambridge—so allowing him to share in the tradition as had an earlier immigrant, Ernest Rutherford. As soon as the bombs to be used against Japan were delivered, j. robert oppenheimer went back to being as sarcastic as ever, suddenly addressing

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(and also, who had a better idea?) that although the solar system model was 267 notes eventually overthrown, what began with the mathematical weakness of Ernest Rutherford has carried on in popular mythology to become the default model most people carry of what an atom looks like. 96 There were positively charged

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era

by Craig Nelson  · 25 Mar 2014  · 684pp  · 188,584 words

March 28, 1902, they produced one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride. In time, English chemist Frederick Soddy would work with New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford to discover the secret of uranic rays, the remarkable ability of radioactive elements to, through the spontaneous loss of subatomic particles, change into other elements

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a new dress for the occasion, and just as she had for her wedding, she got one that would work equally well as lab wear. Ernest Rutherford, the discoverer of the classical model of the atom (with electrons orbiting nuclei much as the planets revolve around the sun), visited from Canada and

…

was walking the streets of London as he always did, in an absentminded haze, a man neither here, nor there, pondering Wells, Hitler, and especially Ernest Rutherford’s pronouncement in the Times the day before that “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking

…

woman at this stage in history deserves commendation, especially as balance to his future ill treatment of this historic colleague. Otto Hahn had worked under Ernest Rutherford at Canada’s McGill University, where the New Zealander who’d split the atom had said the Frankfurter had “a nose for discovering new elements

The Scientist as Rebel

by Freeman Dyson  · 1 Jan 2006  · 332pp  · 109,213 words

problems of cosmology, while the amateurs are finding pretty little comets and asteroids. The view of the majority of professionals was expressed by the physicist Ernest Rutherford, the discoverer of the atomic nucleus, who said: “Physics is the only real science, the rest is butterfly-collecting.” For most professional astronomers, the large

…

theory, the young revolutionaries were Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac, making their great discoveries at the age of twenty-five, and the old conservative was Ernest Rutherford, dismissing them with his famous statement, “They play games with their symbols but we turn out the real facts of Nature.” Rutherford was a great

…

ATOM IS almost entirely made of empty space, with a tiny object called the nucleus and even tinier objects called electrons flying around inside it. Ernest Rutherford, a young New Zealander working in Manchester, England, discovered this fact about atoms in 1909. He shot fast particles at a thin film of gold

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

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that called him, and he knew that in the world of physics Cambridge, England, was “more near the center.” Hoping that the eminent English physicist Ernest Rutherford, celebrated as the man who had first developed a model of the nuclear atom in 1911, would take him under his wing, Robert persuaded his

…

of hunger. Pipe tobacco and cigarettes quickly became thereafter a lifelong addiction. Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. “Rutherford wouldn’t have me,” Oppenheimer recalled. “He didn’t think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar.” In the event

…

his first major paper in theoretical physics, a study of the “collision” or “continuous spectrum” problem. It was hard work. One day he walked into Ernest Rutherford’s office and saw Bohr sitting in a chair. Rutherford rose from behind his desk and introduced his student to Bohr. The renowned Danish physicist

Coming of Age in the Milky Way

by Timothy Ferris  · 30 Jun 1988  · 661pp  · 169,298 words

research that would lead, eventually, to Einstein’s realization that every atom is a bundle of energy. At McGill University in Montreal, the energetic experimentalist Ernest Rutherford, a great bear of a man whose roaring voice sent his assistants and their laboratory glassware trembling, found that radioactive materials can produce surprisingly large

…

elements radium and polonium. Time: 1900 Noteworthy Events: Max Planck proposes the quantum theory of radiation, the basis of quantum physics. Time: 1904 Noteworthy Events: Ernest Rutherford suggests that the amount of helium produced by the radioactive decay of minerals in rocks could be employed to measure the age of the earth

…

“star streaming”—that stars in our neighborhood move in a preferred direction—an early clue to the rotation of our galaxy. Time: 1911 Noteworthy Events: Ernest Rutherford determines that most of the mass of atoms is contained in their tiny nuclei. Time: 1912 Noteworthy Events: Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovers a correlation between

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