A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [67]
The work made Dalton famous—albeit in a low-key, English Quaker sort of way. In 1826, the French chemist P .J. Pelletier traveled to Manchester to meet the atomic hero. Pelletier expected to find him attached to some grand institution, so he was astounded to discover him teaching elementary arithmetic to boys in a small school on a back street. According to the scientific historian E. J. Holmyard, a confused Pelletier, upon beholding the great man, stammered:
“Est-ce que j'ai l'honneur de m'addresser à Monsieur Dalton?” for he could hardly believe his eyes that this was the chemist of European fame, teaching a boy his first four rules. “Yes,” said the matter-of-fact Quaker. “Wilt thou sit down whilst I put this lad right about his arithmetic?”
Although Dalton tried to avoid all honors, he was elected to the Royal Society against his wishes, showered with medals, and given a handsome government pension. When he died in 1844, forty thousand people viewed the coffin, and the funeral cortege stretched for two miles. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography is one of the longest, rivaled in length only by those of Darwin and Lyell among nineteenth-century men of science.
For a century after Dalton made his proposal, it remained entirely hypothetical, and a few eminent scientists—notably the Viennese physicist Ernst Mach, for whom is named the speed of sound—doubted the existence of atoms at all. “Atoms cannot be perceived by the senses . . . they are things of thought,” he wrote. The existence of atoms was so doubtfully held in the German-speaking world in particular that it was said to have played a part in the suicide of the great theoretical physicist, and atomic enthusiast, Ludwig Boltzmann in 1906.
It was Einstein who provided the first incontrovertible evidence of atoms' existence with his paper on Brownian motion in 1905, but this attracted little attention and in any case Einstein was soon to become consumed with his work on general relativity. So the first real hero of the atomic age, if not the first personage on the scene, was Ernest Rutherford.
Rutherford was born in 1871 in the “back blocks” of New Zealand to parents who had emigrated from Scotland to raise a little flax and a lot of children (to paraphrase Steven Weinberg). Growing up in a remote part of a remote country, he was about as far from the mainstream of science as it was possible to be, but in 1895 he won a scholarship that took him to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, which was about to become the hottest place in the world to do physics.
Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. When the wife of the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. “Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood,” he remarked in wonder to a friend. “But a chemist . . .”
It was a feeling Rutherford would have understood. “All science is either physics or stamp collecting,” he once said, in a line that has been used many times since. There is a certain engaging irony therefore that when he won the Nobel Prize in 1908, it was in chemistry, not physics.
Rutherford was a lucky man—lucky to be a genius, but even luckier to live at a time when physics and chemistry were so exciting and so compatible (his own sentiments notwithstanding). Never again would they quite so comfortably overlap.
For all his success, Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics. Often during lectures he