RUTHERFORD

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22883, 2 December 1939, Page 16

RUTHERFORD

' Dr. Eve’s Biography Rutherford: Being: the Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Lord Rutherford, O.M. By A. S. Eve, D.Sc., etc. With a foreword by Earl Baldwin of Bcwdley, K.C. Cambridge University Press. 451 pp. (21/- net.) [Reviewed by C. COLERIDGE FARR, F.R.S.]

The issue of this book marks the close of a great scientific epoch and gives the intimate story of a great and good life. Soon after Lord Rutherford died, the choice of his biographer was discussed by the representatives of the Cambridge University Press, to which almost as a matter of course the publication fell, with Lady Rutherford and the President of the Royal Sir William Bragg. The task was given to Dr. Eve. a former research student of Rutherford's, a friend for more than 35 years, and Rutherford’s successor in the Macdonald Professorship of Physics at Montreal. That the choice was well made no one reading the book can doubt, for besides the events of Rutherford’s life his character is shown forth to • the world with a touch of affection - and respect evident from the first to the last page of the book. Dr. Eve has had access to sources of information that would have been closed to others. Lady Rutherford, for example, had been unremitting in her care of documents and corres- ~ pondence; letters written by Rutherford to former research students of his, all of whom remained his fast friends, have been collected from their recipients and used in the book; and, last but not least, letters that Rutherford wrote to his mother, who lived .to so great an age that ' she died only a few years before ' him, were carefully preserved by - her and though some of them seem to have gone astray in their passage from New Plymouth to England, yet many were available. Record and Portrait 1 / I suppose that the object in view " in writing the life of a famous man ’ is a twofold one: first to give a picture in words of the kind of man , he was, of his personality, and his character, and second to give some idea of the work he did. In the case of. a scientific man like Rutherford, this last is neither so 'easy nor so important as the first. It is not so easy, as the outer frontiers of science are generally not understood by the man to whom the book is addressed. He is not able, to appreciate to the full what it is that scientific men of the very front rank . are seeking in their investigations, nor how it is that these investigations’’carry them on to the object . of their quest. But fortunately this side of the question is not so importt ant from the public point of view, i ' for the men who want to know these things can get them from the various journals in which accounts of the work have appeared as it has been done; and it is generally true of the leaders of scientific thought that their collected papers are also reSublished later on. Readers of the fe of such a man as Lord Rutherford are content to accept the fact r that he was a famous scientific man ; and they are more anxious to know ;* what sort of a man he was apart , from his science. And here Dr. Eve has been particularly fortunate in having as part of his material so many letters that Rutherford wrote to his mother and to his wife. For ; to such as these, a man unburdens f his whole soul. He shows forth both 1 .his faults and his virtues. And in his use of these letters, many of them ' printed in the book, Dr. Eve has ‘ succeeded admirably in painting a picture of the man as he realty was, a natural, boisterous, loveable boy, one who was the life and soul of ; any gathering at which he was, and , one, moreover, without the faintest trace of swank or frill. And yet, as letters from his scientific friends and correspondents show, he was • regarded by all of them as a master mind, ah. experimental super-man, " the greatest physical genius of modem times. What I am trying to bring out; and what is well shown in this book of Dr. Eve’s, is expressed by Earl Baldwin, who writes . the foreword: And yet having said this much, how ‘ ’ little has one really described him! His refreshing personality, his dauntr less spirit, the merry twinkle in his eye, ' the exuberance of his everyouthful, , ever-joyful enthusiasm: how can they be recaptured and confined within the limits of mere words! As well might one essay to distil the

essence of the wind. One can only say he was a man, a peer among men: he was Rutherford. v The Praise of Associates There are many interesting and amusing stories told about him in this book, in which nothing of importance in illustrating his genial nature has been suppressed. One there is about a cow which, in his early days, he employed to drag up a log from the bush. He had tied the log to the cow’s tail; and as the log had jambed in a gate the cow reached the milking shed minus a bit of its tail. When asked what he had done with the bit, he replied, “Oh, I had heard that tails grew from cuttings, so I planted it.” These were parts of Rutherford, and very loveable parts, too, though the cow might possibly differ. But the esteem in which he was held by his scientific associates all over the world is also well developed by the quotation of many letters on a great variety of scientific points of detail, on which they looked to him for guidance, suggestion, or inspiration. Many, but not all, of these letters are from former research workers of his, with whom he seemed not so much to take the part of the superior professor (for superiority he never assumed) but to become one of themselves, one who like them was interested in problems yet unsolved. These letters, with extracts from discussions and speeches, show the value that was put on his opinion. Lord Kelvin, who was, of course, in his day and subject the leader of scientific thought, could not at once bring himself to fall in with Rutherford’s novel and revolutionary views on atomic questions. He, like Maxwell, had taught that the atom was a created entity, created as it was and unalterable. Rutherford, on the other hand, was carrying the world with him in the view that atoms were built-up bodies of exceedingly complex structure. Kelvin for some time stuck to his guns, when indeed “all but he had fled.” Eventually he came round to Rutherford’s views, but he was about the last of the /world’s great scientific men to do so; Thus did Rutherford alter the entire outlook of man upon the universe in which he lives. The Pioneer The book must be read if those whose work has been in other directions are to form any conception at all of Rutherford’s greatness. He was indeed too great a man to worry at all about his own eminence, though he was naturally pleased when decorations and honours showered upon him. It is probable that most people have some indistinct idea of what it is that Lord Rutherford has done; but perhaps a short resume may not be out of place. He anticipated. Marconi by several years in the magnetic detector for wireless waves, a device used in the early days of wireless. He sorted out and set in order the three kinds of rays which the radioactive elements emit and he was the leader and inspirer of a band of workers who together delineated the “life history” of the heavy elements, the radio-active elements, as in the course of ages they broke down and finally became lead. He was the originator of the “disintegration” explanation of these changes, which before his day no one had even dreamed of. That disintegration theory is now quite established. He showed that the only picture of an “atom” which would fit in with all the facts, of which he was himself the main discoverer, was one which made it a miniature solar system with a tiny nucleus and planetary electrons surrounding it. The complexity of this structure is terrific as compared with an outside view of the complexity of the solar system. The central nucleus is almost inconceivably small; but he fired at it and he hit it, and was thus the first human being intentionally to convert one element into another, or, rather, two others. He became in this way the first successful alchemist, preceded only by Nature, whose different process he first discovered and explained. “The Newton of the Atom” Since then all the elements have been broken up and converted into others by the same methods as Rutherford first used. He then went still further afield, into the previously hidden fastness ’ of sub-atomic structure, and studied the structure of the nucleus itself. He had obtained much information about its complicated build, when his life so tragically ended. When one remembers that the actual diameter of this nucleus is less than one ten-million-millionth of the width of one’s middle finger nail — well, imagine it! These things he did, and many more. My own view is (and I find it categorically confirmed by others) that he shares with Faraday the distinction of being one of the two greatest experi-

menters that the world has known, and possibly that it ever will know. Of him Professor A. S. Eddington has said that, in 1911, Rutherford introduced the greatest .change in our ideas of matter since the time of Democritus. Again, Eve says: “Rutherford was the Newton of the atom, dealing with the disintegration and the building of atoms. He was the king of the microcosm, leading an army to ever fresh conquests. The harvest of his v■ ■>i hj has not yet been fully revealed. Who can doubt that this will appear with time?” But the question that a reviewer has to answer is not whether Rutherford was a great man, but whether the author has been successful in showing how, and why, he was so great. And I can only say that I think he has succeeded, and succeeded admirably. He has brought out the many sides of Rutherford’s remarkable character, dwelling on none of them too long nor going into details too closely. The world owes much to Lady Rutherford for the care she has taken of the documents which have added so much to the human side of the book. And Rutherford was a New Zealander. It is possible that he is a New Zealander whose work will have as much effect upon civilisation in the future as Fc.raday’s has on our comfort, to-day, and one than whom there will not, for many long centuries, be a greater. The authorities of the University of New Zealand and those of Canterbury College are blameworthy in that they have so far taken no steps of which the public is aware to raise a memorial in the University, or in Canterbury College, which will for ever recall and honour his great services to mankind.