LORD RUTHERFORD’S WORK

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 August 1932, Page 12

LORD RUTHERFORD’S WORK

NEW ZEALAND’S GREATEST SON.

Once upon a time a distinguished stranger dined at Trinity College 'in Cambridge. Seated at the high table which is sacred to dons, fellows, and distinguished strangers, he fell into conversations with his table companions. Neither of them was known to him, but one of them he remembered long afterwards because of the unusual range of his conversation. He was a large and heavily built man with a shaggy moustache —altogether a most unscholastic figure to encounter at Trinity’s high table—and his conversation was in keeping with his appearance. It roamed far and wide. Presently it was rambling around the Dominions, and by the time the port arrived it was alighting on the subject of farming, in which it appeared to find itself most remarkably at home. “Who was that Australian farmer that I sat next to?” the stranger inquired after dinner. “That was Lord Rutherford, a New Zealander,” he was told. The stranger was not alone in his initial impression of this bold and skilful experimental scientist, a man whose most startling pronouncements are accepted with confidence throughout the scientific world, a man who has been world-famous for thirty years, and is to-day the head and shoulders of British scientific endeavour of every kind, says a writer in the “New. York Times.” In appearance he is entirely the gentleman farmer. In personality he has none of the broad sympathies of an Einstein. To hear him on the subject.of the classics, for example, is to realise bow one-track a one-track mind can be. To see him and talk to him is to feel that nothing in the man’s appearance affords the faintest clue to’ his immense scientific prestige, except his eyes. You feel that a man with eyes so alive, so shrewd, so penetrating must have something out of the ordinary within him. And so he has. k They say at the famous Cavendish Laboratory' at Cambrige, where they know .him best, that at 60 he has less and! less patience with chemistry and mathematics, the constituent sciences cl physics. His own place is far out “on the firing line” where unknown ground' lies all ahead of him, and he can push cautiously into the darkness by some intiuitive genius which he has for smelling out the truth —some gift which, because he is a born leader of men, he succeeds in communicating to the little band of brilliant youngsters who follow at his heels. Men who know the Cavendish and all' it ..stands for sometimes complain that under his rule other branches of physics are being neglected in favour of atomic research. They sometimes say that he is running the Cavendish into a cul-de-sac from which some day it will have to be extricated if it is to resume its old position as an advanced laboratory of general physics. But whenever these timid voices are raised Lord Rutherford comes back from the “firing line of physics” to announce some new advance which has been made, and the demurring voices die away to a listening hush in which the whole, world of science participates. The latest of these advances has been made after three years of preliminary work and less than a fortnight of actual experiment. Two of his young men, using a hu,ge vacuum tube as tall as a man and terrific electrical forces of 120,000 volts, have succeeded in ‘“splitting” an atom of hydrogen. In doing so, they have mad'e two discoveries—they have obtained energy from the disintegrating atom a hundred times greater than the energy of che particles with which the atom was being bombarded; and they have found that the atom of hydrogen jreaks up into helium. In other words, they have deliberately created new energy for the first time, thus exploding the old law of the “conservation of energy.” Also they have brought che alchemist’s dream of producing rare metals from base within the reach of technical possibility.

“NO COMMERCIAL VALUE.” On both these points the lay mind instantly bristles with questions. Both discoveries seem boundless in their ultimate social, commercial, and philosophical consequences—but Lord Rutherford has a blunt and bluff way with laymen. “Up to the present,” he says, “the experiments have not produced anything of immediate commercial vahie. I’ has been assumed .that we have discovered means of tapping an immense accumulation of electrical energy for ccmmcrcial purposes. We cannot claim that yet, because for every particle of additional energy that we get, millions of particles are required to make the energy effective. The interest of the experiments is l very great, but so far it is purely scientific. We have a powerful new agent for extending our knowledge of the atom.”

There was a time when scientists assumed that the atom was a permajient and indestructible pellet, but that was ’ before Lord' Rutherford moved on from the study of wireless waves to begin the triumph which made the subject of radio-avtivity peculiarly his own. And that in turn led him to the experiments which enenabled him to elaborate the theory of atomic structure which dominates the world of physics to-day—the theory that the atom, instead of being a solid pellet, has a very open structure and rese'mbles a small planetary system, with .a positively charged “sun” in the middle and electrons moving in their ciiits like tiny planets around it.

Scientists are now satisfied that the atom, is a fundamentally electrical structure. As Lord Rutherford states it, “there are particles charged positively and negatively. By the electrical forces of attraction the charged particles are held together. The particles are really nothing more than units of electricity—the electron a unit of negative electricity and the proton a unit of positive electricity.” Such is “the Rutherford atom.”

Soine scientist has attempted to describe the smallness of an atom by saying that “if yon had an ordinary electric light bu,lb and if you could made a hole in it small enough to admit only 1,000,000 atoms of air per second', it would take 100,000,000 years to till the bulb with air.” Yet Lord Rutherford plays with atoms as other men play with billiard balls. The most skilful experimenter living, he has devised apparatus to carry out tasks of atomic research which other men would abandon as hopeless.

Go into the Cavendish laboratory in Free School lane. Walk straight through ’ to the courtyard at the back. What seems to be a disorderly clutter

of boiler rooms, temporary wooden buildings, and wooden walks presents itself. Here are plants for liquefying gases and for producing intense magnetic fields. Here is the heavy artillery of the “firing line of physics.” Your companion who knows the place seems able to find his way direct to the door he wants. There is a small red sigh “Danger” * above the door. Within are a dynamo whose loud drone makes you shout at the top of your voice, a tall black switchboard with a table before it on which your companion lays aside his pipe, and thick ropes of electric cables that you step over as you cross the room, and an assortment of heavy electrical geai mounted on cement bases 1 which make it independent of any tremor in the wooden floor. The whole room is new and wooden and unpainted, as if it were designed for a single use—-to pursue the elusive atom a little fuitlier. , . This is where Lord Rutherford is most at home. Elsewhere he sounds a little remote at.times. Students who consult him sometimes find him somewhat far-away in manner. He has been known to answer a question by directing the full gaze of his penetrating eyes" on one of his advanced students and asking suddenly, “Are you a Scot? . ... You ought to be studying theology.” But. in the laboratory his eyes are calm and untroubled. The band of brilliant youngsters who gather about him can hardly be said always to wear the happiest of faces. Their typical look is rather that of men - who are consumed' by a single obsession and are far more anxious about its immediate results than about such trifles as luncheon and dinner. But they must surely be at heart the happiest of all mortals, for they work according to plan under the most inspiring of leaders, and they never worry about the ultimate consequences. It has not fallen to many, even of the greatest scientists, to command so enormous an influence in his own lifetime as Lord Rutherford can claim. It is only in his speeches that the layman is afforded a glimpse of the power and originality'of the man, and in England his speeches are reported as fully as 'he Prime Minister’s. He is one of the best of speakers, with a lobust wit and a gift of marvellously clear exposition. F’o-uans because he comes from the T»-^i n ions (in England they n-.gard him as New Zealand’s greatest son), he has none of the dry-as-dust manner of the conventional fellow of Trinity. He has,. instead, a bluffness and. heartiness in keeping with his big physique.