Rutherford

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It was an astonishing career, creatively active until the month he died. He was born very poor, as I have said. New Zealand was, in the 1880s, the most remote of provinces, but he managed to get a good education; enough of the old Scottish tradition had percolated there, and he won all the prizes. He was as original as Einstein, but unlike Einstein he did not revolt against formal instruction; he was top in classics as well as in everything else. He started research — on the subject of wireless waves — with equipment such as one might rustle up today in an African laboratory. That did not deter him: “I could do research at the North Pole,” he once proclaimed, and it was true. Then he was awarded one of the 1851 overseas scholarships (which later brought to England Florey, Oliphant, Philip Bowden, a whole series of gifted Antipodeans). In fact, he got the scholarship only because another man, placed above him, chose to get married: with the curious humility that was interwoven with his boastfulness, he was grateful all of his life. There was a proposal, when he was Lord Rutherford, President of the Royal Society, the greatest of living experimental scientists, to cut down these scholarships. Rutherford was on the committee. He was too upset to speak: at last he blurted out:

“If it had not been for them, I shouldn't have been.” That was nonsense. Nothing could have stopped him. He brought his wireless work to Cambridge, anticipated Marconi, and then dropped it because he saw a field — radioactivity — more scientifically interesting. If he had pushed on with wireless, incidentally, he couldn't have avoided becoming rich. But for that he never had time to spare. He provided for his wife and daughter, they lived in comfortable middle-class houses -- and that was all. His work led directly to the atomic energy industry spending, within ten years of his death, thousands of millions of pounds. He himself never earned, or wanted to earn, more than a professor's salary — about £i,~~6oo~~ a year at the Cavendish in the thirties. In his will he left precisely the value of his Nobel Prize, then worth £7,000. Of the people I am writing about, he died much the poorest: even G. H. Hardy, who by Rutherford's side looked so ascetic and unworldly, happened not to be above taking an interest in his investments.

“If it had not been for them, I shouldn't have been.” That was nonsense. Nothing could have stopped him. He brought his wireless work to Cambridge, anticipated Marconi, and then dropped it because he saw a field — radioactivity — more scientifically interesting. If he had pushed on with wireless, incidentally, he couldn't have avoided becoming rich. But for that he never had time to spare. He provided for his wife and daughter, they lived in comfortable middle-class houses -- and that was all. His work led directly to the atomic energy industry spending, within ten years of his death, thousands of millions of pounds. He himself never earned, or wanted to earn, more than a professor's salary — about £1,600 a year at the Cavendish in the thirties. In his will he left precisely the value of his Nobel Prize, then worth £7,000. Of the people I am writing about, he died much the poorest: even G. H. Hardy, who by Rutherford's side looked so ascetic and unworldly, happened not to be above taking an interest in his investments.

As soon as Rutherford got on to radioactivity, he was set on his life's work. His ideas were simple, rugged, material: he kept them so. He thought of atoms as though they were tennis balls. He discovered particles smaller than atoms, and discovered how they moved or bounced. Sometimes the particles bounced the wrong way. Then he inspected the facts and made a new but always simple picture. In that way he moved, as certainly as a sleepwalker, from unstable radioactive atoms to the discovery of the nucleus and the structure of the atom.

Rutherford: Difference between revisions

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 It was an astonishing career, creatively active until the month he died. He was born very poor, as I have said. New Zealand was, in the 1880s, the most remote of provinces, but he managed to get a good education; enough of the old Scottish tradition had percolated there, and he won all the prizes. He was as original as Einstein, but unlike Einstein he did not revolt against formal instruction; he was top in classics as well as in everything else. He started research — on the subject of wireless waves — with equipment such as one might rustle up today in an African laboratory. That did not deter him: &ldquo;I could do research at the North Pole,&rdquo; he once proclaimed, and it was true. Then he was awarded one of the 1851 overseas scholarships (which later brought to England Florey, Oliphant, Philip Bowden, a whole series of gifted Antipodeans). In fact, he got the scholarship only because another man, placed above him, chose to get married: with the curious humility that was interwoven with his boastfulness, he was grateful all of his life. There was a proposal, when he was Lord Rutherford, President of the Royal Society, the greatest of living experimental scientists, to cut down these scholarships. Rutherford was on the committee. He was too upset to speak: at last he blurted out:
-&ldquo;If it had not been for them, I shouldn't have been.&rdquo; That was nonsense. Nothing could have stopped him. He brought his wireless work to Cambridge, anticipated Marconi, and then dropped it because he saw a field — radioactivity — more scientifically interesting. If he had pushed on with wireless, incidentally, he couldn't have avoided becoming rich. But for that he never had time to spare. He provided for his wife and daughter, they lived in comfortable middle-class houses -- and that was all. His work led directly to the atomic energy industry spending, within ten years of his death, thousands of millions of pounds. He himself never earned, or wanted to earn, more than a professor's salary — about £i,6oo a year at the Cavendish in the thirties. In his will he left precisely the value of his Nobel Prize, then worth £7,000. Of the people I am writing about, he died much the poorest: even G. H. Hardy, who by Rutherford's side looked so ascetic and unworldly, happened not to be above taking an interest in his investments.
+&ldquo;If it had not been for them, I shouldn't have been.&rdquo; That was nonsense. Nothing could have stopped him. He brought his wireless work to Cambridge, anticipated Marconi, and then dropped it because he saw a field — radioactivity — more scientifically interesting. If he had pushed on with wireless, incidentally, he couldn't have avoided becoming rich. But for that he never had time to spare. He provided for his wife and daughter, they lived in comfortable middle-class houses -- and that was all. His work led directly to the atomic energy industry spending, within ten years of his death, thousands of millions of pounds. He himself never earned, or wanted to earn, more than a professor's salary — about £1,600 a year at the Cavendish in the thirties. In his will he left precisely the value of his Nobel Prize, then worth £7,000. Of the people I am writing about, he died much the poorest: even G. H. Hardy, who by Rutherford's side looked so ascetic and unworldly, happened not to be above taking an interest in his investments.
 As soon as Rutherford got on to radioactivity, he was set on his life's work. His ideas were simple, rugged, material: he kept them so. He thought of atoms as though they were tennis balls. He discovered particles smaller than atoms, and discovered how they moved or bounced. Sometimes the particles bounced the wrong way. Then he inspected the facts and made a new but always simple picture. In that way he moved, as certainly as a sleepwalker, from unstable radioactive atoms to the discovery of the nucleus and the structure of the atom.