Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [46]
With only four months left in England, Bohr arrived in Manchester in the middle of March 1912 to begin a seven-week course in the experimental techniques of radioactive research. With no time to lose, Bohr spent his evenings working on the application of electron physics to provide a better understanding of the physical properties of metals. With Geiger and Marsden among the instructors, he successfully completed the course and was given a small research project by Rutherford.
'Rutherford is a man whom one cannot be mistaken about,' Bohr wrote to Harald, 'he comes regularly to hear how things are going and talk about every little thing.'60 Unlike Thomson, who seemed to him unconcerned about the progress of his students, Rutherford was 'really interested in the work of all people who are around him'. He had an uncanny ability to recognise scientific promise. Eleven of his students, along with several close collaborators, would win the Nobel Prize. As soon as Bohr arrived in Manchester, Rutherford wrote to a friend: 'Bohr, a Dane, has pulled out of Cambridge and turned up here to get some experience in radioactive work.'61 Yet there was nothing in what Bohr had done to date to suggest that he was any different from the other eager young men in his laboratory, except the fact that he was a theorist.
Rutherford held a generally low opinion of theorists and never lost an opportunity to air it. 'They play games with their symbols,' he once told a colleague, 'but we turn out the real solid facts of Nature.'62 On another occasion when invited to deliver a lecture on the trends of modern physics, he replied: 'I can't give a paper on that. It would only take two minutes. All I could say would be that the theoretical physicists have got their tails up and it is time that we experimentalists pulled them down again!'63 Yet he had immediately liked the 26-year-old Dane. 'Bohr's different', he would say. 'He's a football player!'64
Late every afternoon, work in the laboratory stopped as the research students and staff gathered to chat over tea, cakes and slices of bread and butter. Rutherford would be there, sitting on a stool with plenty to say, whatever the subject. But most of the time the talk was simply of physics, particularly of the atom and radioactivity. Rutherford had succeeded in creating a culture where there was an almost tangible sense of discovery in the air, where ideas were openly exchanged and discussed in the spirit of co-operation, with no one afraid to speak – even a newcomer. At its centre was Rutherford, who Bohr knew was always prepared 'to listen to every young man, when he felt he had any idea, however modest, on his mind'.65 The only thing Rutherford could not stand was 'pompous talk'. Bohr loved to talk.
Unlike Einstein who spoke and wrote fluently, Bohr frequently paused as he struggled to find the right words to express himself, whether in Danish, English or German. When Bohr spoke, he was often only thinking aloud in search of clarity. It was during the tea breaks that he got to know the Hungarian Georg von Hevesy, who would win the 1943 Nobel Prize for chemistry for developing the technique of radioactive tracing that was to become a powerful diagnostic tool in medicine, with widespread applications in chemical and biological research.
Strangers in a strange country, speaking a language that both had yet to master, the pair formed an easy friendship that lasted a lifetime. 'He knew how to be helpful to a foreigner', Bohr said as he recalled how Hevesy, only a few months older, helped him ease into the life of the laboratory.66 It was during their conversations that Bohr first began to focus on the atom, as Hevesy explained that so many radioactive elements had been discovered that there was not enough room to accommodate them all in the periodic table. The very names given to these 'radioelements', spawned in the process