Rutherford

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From that time until he died, I had some opportunities of watching Rutherford at close quarters. Several of my friends knew him intimately, which I never did. It is a great pity that Tizard or Kapitsa, both acute psychological observers, did not write about him at length. But I be- longed to a dining club which he attended, and I think I had serious conversations with him three times, the two of us alone together.

The difficulty is to separate the inner man from the Rutherfordiana, much of which is quite genuine. From behind a screen in a Cambridge tailor's, a friend and I heard a reverberating voice: “That shirt's too tight round the neck. Every day I grow in girth. <i>Aaaaaand</i> in mentality.” Yet his physical make-up was more nervous than it seemed. In the same way, his temperament, which seemed exuberantly powerful, massively simple, rejoicing with childish satisfaction in creation and fame, was not quite so simple as all that. His was a personality of Johnsonian scale. As with Johnson, the ~~fagade~~ was overbearing and unbroken. But there were fissures within.

The difficulty is to separate the inner man from the Rutherfordiana, much of which is quite genuine. From behind a screen in a Cambridge tailor's, a friend and I heard a reverberating voice: “That shirt's too tight round the neck. Every day I grow in girth. <i>Aaaaaand</i> in mentality.” Yet his physical make-up was more nervous than it seemed. In the same way, his temperament, which seemed exuberantly powerful, massively simple, rejoicing with childish satisfaction in creation and fame, was not quite so simple as all that. His was a personality of Johnsonian scale. As with Johnson, the facade was overbearing and unbroken. But there were fissures within.

No one could have enjoyed himself more, either in creative work or the honors it brought him. He worked hard, but with immense gusto; he got pleasure not only from the high moments, but also from the hours of what to others would be drudgery, sitting in the dark counting the alpha particle scintillations on the screen. His insight was direct, his intuition, with one curious exception, infallible. No scientist has made fewer mistakes. In the corpus of his published work, one of the largest in scientific history, there was nothing he had to correct afterwards. By thirty he had already set going the science of nuclear physics — single-handed, as a professor on five hundred pounds a year, in the isolation of late-Victorian Montreal. By forty, now in Manchester, he had found the structure of the atom — on which all modern nuclear physics depends.

Rutherford: Difference between revisions

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 From that time until he died, I had some opportunities of watching Rutherford at close quarters. Several of my friends knew him intimately, which I never did. It is a great pity that Tizard or Kapitsa, both acute psychological observers, did not write about him at length. But I be- longed to a dining club which he attended, and I think I had serious conversations with him three times, the two of us alone together.
-The difficulty is to separate the inner man from the Rutherfordiana, much of which is quite genuine. From behind a screen in a Cambridge tailor's, a friend and I heard a reverberating voice: &ldquo;That shirt's too tight round the neck. Every day I grow in girth. <i>Aaaaaand</i> in mentality.&rdquo; Yet his physical make-up was more nervous than it seemed. In the same way, his temperament, which seemed exuberantly powerful, massively simple, rejoicing with childish satisfaction in creation and fame, was not quite so simple as all that. His was a personality of Johnsonian scale. As with Johnson, the fagade was overbearing and unbroken. But there were fissures within.
+The difficulty is to separate the inner man from the Rutherfordiana, much of which is quite genuine. From behind a screen in a Cambridge tailor's, a friend and I heard a reverberating voice: &ldquo;That shirt's too tight round the neck. Every day I grow in girth. <i>Aaaaaand</i> in mentality.&rdquo; Yet his physical make-up was more nervous than it seemed. In the same way, his temperament, which seemed exuberantly powerful, massively simple, rejoicing with childish satisfaction in creation and fame, was not quite so simple as all that. His was a personality of Johnsonian scale. As with Johnson, the facade was overbearing and unbroken. But there were fissures within.
 No one could have enjoyed himself more, either in creative work or the honors it brought him. He worked hard, but with immense gusto; he got pleasure not only from the high moments, but also from the hours of what to others would be drudgery, sitting in the dark counting the alpha particle scintillations on the screen. His insight was direct, his intuition, with one curious exception, infallible. No scientist has made fewer mistakes. In the corpus of his published work, one of the largest in scientific history, there was nothing he had to correct afterwards. By thirty he had already set going the science of nuclear physics — single-handed, as a professor on five hundred pounds a year, in the isolation of late-Victorian Montreal. By forty, now in Manchester, he had found the structure of the atom — on which all modern nuclear physics depends.