Lord Ernest Rutherford did so much more than split the atom, he split the nucleus of the atom. File photo / Supplied
Lord Ernest Rutherford did so much more than split the atom, he split the nucleus of the atom. File photo / Supplied
COMMENT
I have just returned from a brief period of research at Cambridge University. Each morning, I ate my breakfast in Trinity College under a large portrait of Lord Ernest Rutherford, whose image rightfully sits on the front of our $100 notes.
As I sat there I was thinking notof the $100 note but the fact that, exactly 100 years earlier, his trailblazing work on "splitting the atom" was published. It is for this that he is best known in the public imagination though his Nobel Prize was for his earlier work in Canada on radioactivity.
Splitting the atom is not quite accurate. He split the atom's nucleus and, as was shown later, transmuted the element nitrogen into oxygen and hydrogen. He is regarded as the "father of nuclear physics".
Many today have the notion that science is a cold, rigid, purely objective process but Rutherford was driven as much by intuition as by observation.
Rutherford, from Brightwater just out of Nelson, is regarded as one of the greatest experimental physicists in human history. On his premature death he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey near to Isaac Newton. It would be lamentable indeed for us in his homeland to overlook the great strides he was taking a century ago.
He clearly understood that the "small steps" he was taking in the lab at the time were "giant leaps for mankind". It was towards the end of World War I and at one stage he was so absorbed in his work that he forgot an important meeting at the War Research Office. The excuse he offered: "I have been engaged in experiments which suggest that the atom can be artificially disintegrated. If it is true, it is of far greater importance than a war."
This was indeed prophetic. The work he began then, ended World War II.
It started some years earlier in Manchester University, where his former student Ernest Marsden bombarded hydrogen gas with alpha particles emitted from a radioactive source. Marsden left in 1915 for the post of Professor of Physics at Victoria University. There was no suitable source of radioactivity in New Zealand for him and he eventually enlisted for the war where, serving in France, he was awarded the Military Cross.
Later, back in New Zealand, Marsden went on to found the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the forerunner of our Crown Research Institutes: GNS, ESR, Landcare, AgResearch, Plant and Food Research, SCION, NIWA and Callaghan Innovation. His name is honoured in the Marsden Fund, our primary source of contestable research funds for fundamental research.
Throughout the latter part of World War I, Rutherford extended Marsden's research. It was the collision of alpha particles with nitrogen molecules which led to his discovery. Little flashes of light on a screen convinced Rutherford that hydrogen atoms were produced when no possible stray hydrogen was present. On one occasion a visitor to his lab asked: "Where are we going from here?" Rutherford replied: "Who knows? We are entering no-man's land."
I like that. Fundamental scientific research is always entering "no-man's land", where no one has trod before. That's the thrill of research.
Rutherford's work appeared in four back-to-back papers in the Philosophical Magazine sandwiched between an article on the vibrations of stringed musical instruments and one on the vibrations of viscous fluids. The crucial final paper is short, just six-and-a-half pages.
It is simple, elegant and relentless in its logical dismissal of all alternatives except his one central revolutionary conclusion - the nucleus is split by the fast-moving alpha particle into some of its constituents. One of these fragments was a proton (the nucleus of a hydrogen atom) and it is these that caused the little flashes of light on Rutherford's screen.
Many today have the notion that science is a cold, rigid, purely objective process but Rutherford was driven as much by intuition as by observation. His intuitive imagination successfully postulated nuclear fission, the existence of the neutron, the equivalence of alpha particles and helium nuclei, the nuclear structure of the atom, the disintegration of heavier nuclei using accelerators and his certainty that his discoveries for mankind eclipsed even a world war.
Rutherford and Marsden parted ways. One to continue traversing the no-man's land of fundamental research, making huge leaps for mankind's fledgling understanding of nuclear physics; the other, Marsden, to establish the DSIR with its more mundane task of applied research to improve the productivity of a young nation, step by step.
Jeff Tallon. Photo / Supplied
In a recent opinion piece Colin Harvey suggested Crown Research Institutes are dragging our universities down by draining funds better spent in our top academic institutions. The CRIs would argue the opposite. Indeed, over the past 40 years the per capita spend on CRIs has been steadily depleted despite the fact they have contributed billions of dollars to our economy through "public good research".
The reality is that we have a science system in which different institutions play different roles. We need the Rutherfords; we need the Marsdens; and we need to resource them both.
* Jeff Tallon is a physicist specialising in superconductivity
