Oddments

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 September 1949, Page 4

Oddments

Airborn.—Of 16 pigs sent in a Belgian Sabena charter aircraft from London to Vienna for breeding purposes, 27. disembarked. They killed my musical ambition At my first audition By telling me to take my cornet And pornet. ■ —Norman Thelwell, London. *** * * Of Rutherford—the plain-spoken Ernest Rutherford, of quiet Nelson, before he rose to scientific fame, Baron Rutherford of Nelson, after he had astounded the scientific world by setting forth the nuclear theory of the atom—another scientist wrote: “In 1911 Rutherford introduced the greatest change in our idea of matter since the time of Democritus” —and the great Greek philosopher lived 400 years B.C. The theory which Rutherford advanced—though he stated it, not as a theory, but with his typical forthright conviction, as a positive fact — arose from his research into radium, which had been discovered some 10 years earlier. What he did was to prove in his laboratory that the energy of the atomic nucleus could be released. Even had he foreseen what lay ahead in terrible application his foundation research must still have continued. • What- was then done was on a minute scale. It was left to others to develop by way of the uranium atom the large-scale release which was exemplified in the atomic bomb. Rutherford opened the door, for good or ill. : —The Seeker