Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [40]
On his first day, in May 1907, the new head of physics at Manchester University caused a stir as he searched for his new office. 'Rutherford went up three stairs at a time, which was horrible to us, to see a Professor going up the stairs like that', remembered a laboratory assistant.24 But within a few weeks the boundless energy and earthy no-nonsense approach of the 36-year-old had captivated his new colleagues. Rutherford was on his way to creating an exceptional research team whose success over the next decade or so would be unmatched. It was a group shaped as much by Rutherford's personality as his inspired scientific judgement and ingenuity. He was not only its head, but also its heart.
Born on 30 August 1871 in a small, single-storey wooden house in Spring Grove on New Zealand's South Island, Rutherford was the fourth of twelve children. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father ended up working in a flax mill. Given the harshness of life in the scattered rural community, James and Martha Rutherford did what they could to ensure that their children had a chance to go as far as talent and luck would carry them. For Ernest it meant a series of scholarships that took him to the other side of the world and Cambridge University.
When he arrived at the Cavendish to study under Thomson in October 1895, Rutherford was far from the exuberant and self-confident man he would become within a few years. The transformation began as he continued work started in New Zealand on the detection of 'wireless' waves, later called radio waves. In only a matter of months Rutherford developed a much-improved detector and toyed with the idea of making money from it. Just in time, he realised that exploiting research for financial gain in a scientific culture where patents were rare would harm the chances of a young man yet to make his reputation. As the Italian Guglielmo Marconi amassed a fortune that could have been his, Rutherford never regretted abandoning his detector to explore a discovery that had been front-page news around the world.
On 8 November 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen found that every time he passed a high-voltage electric current through an evacuated glass tube, some unknown radiation was causing a small paper screen coated with barium platinocyanide to glow. When Röntgen, the 50-year-old professor of physics at the University of Würzburg, was later asked what he had thought on discovering his mysterious new rays, he replied: 'I did not think; I investigated.'25 For nearly six weeks, he did 'the same experiment over and over again to make absolutely certain that the rays actually existed'.26 He confirmed that the tube was the source of the strange emanation causing the fluorescence.27
Röntgen asked his wife Bertha to place her hand on a photographic plate while he exposed it to 'X-rays', as he called the unknown radiation. After fifteen minutes Röntgen developed the plate. Bertha was frightened when she saw the outlines of her bones, her two rings and the dark shadows of her flesh. On 1 January 1896, Röntgen mailed copies of his paper, 'A New Kind of Rays', together with photographs of weights in a box and the bones in Bertha's hand, to leading physicists in Germany and abroad. Within days, news of Röntgen's discovery and his amazing photographs spread like wildfire. The world's press latched on to the ghostly photograph revealing the bones in his wife's hand. Within a year, 49 books and over a thousand scientific and semi-popular articles on X-rays would be published.28
Thomson had begun studying the sinister-sounding X-rays even before an English translation of Röntgen's paper appeared in the weekly science journal Nature on 23 January. Engaged in investigating the conduction of electricity through gases, Thomson turned his attention to X-rays when he read that they turned a gas into a conductor. Quickly confirming the claim, he asked Rutherford to help measure