Rutherford

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In 1919 he made one of the significant discoveries of all time: he broke up a nucleus of nitrogen by a direct hit from an alpha particle. That is, man could get inside the atomic nucleus and play with it if he could find the right projectiles. These projectiles could either be provided by radioactive atoms or by ordinary atoms speeded up by electrical machines.

The rest of that story leads to the technical and military history of our time. Rutherford himself never built the great machines which have dominated modern particle physics, though some of his pupils, notably Cockcroft, started them. Rutherford himself worked with bizarrely simple apparatus: but in fact he carried the use of such apparatus as far as it would go. His researches remain the last supreme single-handed achievement in fundamental physics. No one else can ever work there again — in the old Cavendish phrase — with sealing wax and string. ”

The rest of that story leads to the technical and military history of our time. Rutherford himself never built the great machines which have dominated modern particle physics, though some of his pupils, notably Cockcroft, started them. Rutherford himself worked with bizarrely simple apparatus: but in fact he carried the use of such apparatus as far as it would go. His researches remain the last supreme single-handed achievement in fundamental physics. No one else can ever work there again — in the old Cavendish phrase — with “sealing wax and string”.

It was not done without noise: it was done with anger and storms—but also with an overflow of creative energy, with abundance and generosity, as though research were the easiest and most natural avocation in the world. He had deep sympathy with the creative arts, particularly literature; he read more novels than most literary people manage to do. He had no use for critics of any kind. He felt both suspicion and dislike of the people who invested scientific research or any other branch of creation with an aura of difficulty, who used long, methodological words to explain things which he did perfectly by instinct. “Those fellows,” he used to call them. “Those fellows” were the logicians, the critics, the metaphysicians. They were clever; they were usually more lucid than he was; in argument against them he often felt at a disadvantage. Yet somehow they never produced a serious piece of work, whereas he was the greatest experimental scientist of the age.

Rutherford: Difference between revisions

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 In 1919 he made one of the significant discoveries of all time: he broke up a nucleus of nitrogen by a direct hit from an alpha particle. That is, man could get inside the atomic nucleus and play with it if he could find the right projectiles. These projectiles could either be provided by radioactive atoms or by ordinary atoms speeded up by electrical machines.
-The rest of that story leads to the technical and military history of our time. Rutherford himself never built the great machines which have dominated modern particle physics, though some of his pupils, notably Cockcroft, started them. Rutherford himself worked with bizarrely simple apparatus: but in fact he carried the use of such apparatus as far as it would go. His researches remain the last supreme single-handed achievement in fundamental physics. No one else can ever work there again — in the old Cavendish phrase — with sealing wax and string. &rdquo;
+The rest of that story leads to the technical and military history of our time. Rutherford himself never built the great machines which have dominated modern particle physics, though some of his pupils, notably Cockcroft, started them. Rutherford himself worked with bizarrely simple apparatus: but in fact he carried the use of such apparatus as far as it would go. His researches remain the last supreme single-handed achievement in fundamental physics. No one else can ever work there again — in the old Cavendish phrase — with &ldquo;sealing wax and string&rdquo;.
 It was not done without noise: it was done with anger and storms—but also with an overflow of creative energy, with abundance and generosity, as though research were the easiest and most natural avocation in the world. He had deep sympathy with the creative arts, particularly literature; he read more novels than most literary people manage to do. He had no use for critics of any kind. He felt both suspicion and dislike of the people who invested scientific research or any other branch of creation with an aura of difficulty, who used long, methodological words to explain things which he did perfectly by instinct. &ldquo;Those fellows,&rdquo; he used to call them. &ldquo;Those fellows&rdquo; were the logicians, the critics, the metaphysicians. They were clever; they were usually more lucid than he was; in argument against them he often felt at a disadvantage. Yet somehow they never produced a serious piece of work, whereas he was the greatest experimental scientist of the age.