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If you want to understand how something works, you can dismantle it and study its pieces. But what if the thing you're curious about is too small to see, even with the most powerful microscope? Brian Cathcart's The Fly in the Cathedral tells the intriguing story of how scientists were able to take atoms apart to reveal the secrets of their structures. To keep the story gripping, Cathcart focuses on a time (1932, the annus mirabilis of British physics), a place (Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory), and a few main characters (Ernest Rutherford, the "father of nuclear physics," and his protégés, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton).
Rutherford and his team knew that the long-accepted atomic model was held together by nothing more than trumped-up math and hope. They hoped to find out what held oppositely charged protons and electrons together, and what strange particles shared the nucleus with protons. In a series of remarkable experiments done on homemade apparatus, these Cambridge scientists moved atomic science to within an inch of its ultimate goal. Finally, Cockcroft and Walton--competing furiously with their American and German peers--put together the machine that would forever change history by splitting an atom. The Fly in the Cathedral combines all the right elements for a great science history: historical context, gritty detail, wrenching failure, and of course, glorious victory. Although the miracles that occurred at Cambridge in 1932 were to result in the fearful, looming threat of atomic warfare, Cathcart allows readers to find unfiltered joy in the accomplishments of a few brilliant, ingenious scientists. --Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Cathcart (Test of Greatness: Britain's Struggle for the Atom Bomb), a former reporter for Reuters, presents a superb account of the genesis of nuclear physics in the first third of the 20th century. Although the centerpiece of his story is the experiment performed on April 14, 1932, by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in which an atom of lithium was split into two alpha particles (they would win a Nobel prize for this 19 years later), Cathcart fully describes the experiment's scientific and social context. Through crisp prose, interesting analogies and ample insight, he makes the basics of nuclear physics accessible while demonstrating the passion scientists have for their work. Cockcroft and Walton both worked under Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford at the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University at a time when precious little was known about the nucleus at the center of every atom. The race to understand the inner workings of the nucleus and to split an atom into its component parts was an international one, including labs in Germany, Denmark, Russia and the United States. The great progress that was made in a short time was all the more amazing given that labs had limited budgets and virtually all equipment first had to be conceptualized and then made from scratch. Cathcart instills in the reader a sense of excitement as the nuclear age unfolds around the world. B&w illus. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* A stereotypical scenario has the theorists of twentieth-century physics sporting wild hair and leading wild lives; their exuberance is tamed by the experimentalists, with their trimmed coifs, staid lives, and engineering exactitude. Cathcart's marvelous history of a portentous achievement, the first artificially induced disintegration of an atomic nucleus, in 1932, demonstrates this comparison in compulsively readable fashion. For the role of flamboyant theorist Cathcart introduces George Gamow, the brilliant Russian emigre physicist whose pranks are lore in the field; the feet-on-the-ground experimentalists were John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. Proteges of Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge University, they received the assignment to prove one of Gamow's quantum-mechanical brainstorms: that it was possible to drive an alpha particle (the nucleus of helium) into a larger nucleus, splitting it. Cockcroft thought that a lighter proton could also do the trick and, better yet, was easier to accelerate with the available technology. Cathcart's narrative then expands into the apparatus Cockcroft and Walton devised, branching into the differing contraptions of rivals and the competition for a Nobel. The fluent Cathcart applies just the right intensity in illuminating both the science and the scientists. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
"Cathcart tells this exhilarating story with both verve and precision" --The Sunday Telegraph
Re-creating the frustrations, excitements, and obsessions of 1932, the "miracle year" of British physics, Brian Cathcart reveals in rich detail the astonishing story behind the splitting of the atom. The most celebrated scientific experiment of its time, it would lead to one of mankind's most devastating inventions--the atomic bomb.
All matter is made mostly of empty space. Each of the billions of atoms that comprise it is hollow, its true mass concentrated in a tiny nucleus that, if the atom were a cathedral, would be no bigger than a fly. Discovering its existence three quarters of a century ago was Lord Rutherford's greatest scientific achievement, but even he caught only a glimpse. Almost at the point of despair, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, two young researchers in a grubby basement room at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, grappled with the challenge. Racing against their American and German counterparts-a colorful cast of Nobel Prize winners--they would change everything. With paper-and-pencil calculations, a handmade apparatus, the odd lump of plasticine, and some revolutionary physics, Cockroft and Walton raised the curtain on the atomic age.
The Fly in the Cathedral is a riveting and erudite narrative inspired by the dreams that lead the last true gentlemen scientists to the very essence of the universe: the heart of matter.
About the Author
A former reporter for Reuters and the Independent, Brian Cathcart is the author of: Test of Greatness: Britain's Struggle for the Atom Bomb, among other books. He lives in North London.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from The Fly in the Cathedral: How A Small Group of Cambridge Scientists Won The Race to Split the Atom by Brian Cathcart. Copyright © 2005 by Brian Cathcart. To be published in January, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
Cavendish
For many years Cambridge railway station was not to be found in Cambridge at all, but in the countryside a mile or so out of town. The maps show the line from London closing in on the city and then at the last moment veering eastwards as if repelled by invisible forces within. And repulsion by invisible forces was more or less what happened, for when the first railway was approaching in the 1840s the Cambridge colleges were so fearful of its influence that--in much the same spirit that they secured a ban on Sunday rail traffic--they contrived to locate the station at what one historian has called 'an inconvenient distance'. Several times in later years there were proposals for a more central terminus but they all came to nothing and eventually it was the town that moved, houses and businesses steadily creeping out along the road towards the station until the two were joined and the green fields pushed into the background. That inconvenient distance from the old town centre remains, however, and new arrivals at the station can still be dismayed to find their true destination some way off.
At 8.50 p.m. on Monday 17 October 1927, Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton was just such an arrival. He was twenty-four years old, of medium height with a wiry build, a high forehead, heavy spectacles and a suit of clothes which, while perfectly respectable, bore no trace of style. He was tired, having taken the overnight ferry from Ireland and then changed trains twice as he worked his way across England. The carriages had been crowded and at each staging-post he had had to oversee the unloading and loading of a heavy trunk containing such items as his toolbox, his essential textbooks and, most precious of all, the draft of his M.Sc. thesis. Now he alighted amid the gloom and steam of Cambridge station and once again extracted his trunk from the baggage car. Depositing it in the left-luggage once, he made his way out through the arched portico and there discovered the quirk of his location: he had not quite arrived. It was too late, in any case, to try to make contact with anyone in the town so he found a hotel nearby and had an early night.
After breakfast the next morning he set about his business. It was fortunate that he had an equable personality for another man in his position might have been anxious. There had been an unfortunate mix-up over his application to become a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory, with the result that while other successful applicants had arrived weeks earlier he had needed a last-minute scramble to secure his place. In fact there were grounds to suspect that the laboratory had accepted him only with reluctance, so a warm welcome was by no means assured. This was bad enough, but when Walton made it into town that morning a more pressing concern soon presented itself: time was ticking by but nowhere in the medieval maze of streets and passages could he find his destination and no passer-by whom he approached was able to guide him. 'Cambridge,' he wrote a couple of days later, 'is the hardest place I ever saw to rind your way through. I must have spent over half an hour looking for the Cavendish Laboratory, and I scarcely know the way to it yet, there are so many turns and streets to go through.'
Free School Lane is little more than an alleyway at the back of one of the older colleges, but half-way along it a relieved Walton at last came across the tall, grey Victorian building he was looking for. There was nothing to announce its identity unless you counted a statue of the Duke of Devonshire (family name: Cavendish) and an inscription in Latin which, when translated, announced: 'The works of the Lord are great, searched out by all who have delight in them.' Walton made nothing of these clues but he had been assured this was the place and the oak doors were wide open, so in he went. An archway led beneath the body of the building towards a cobbled courtyard crowded with parked bicycles, and on the right was an office. Asking to see the director, he was informed that Sir Ernest Rutherford was away and that he should report instead to the assistant director. Stone stairs took him up to a dingy corridor where he soon found the office of Dr James Chadwick, a lean man of thirty-five with spectacles, an intense gaze and not much conversation. That Walton had failed to turn up at 9 a.m. sharp was of no consequence to the assistant director since the laboratory tended to begin the day in leisurely fashion. (Punctuality mattered much more when it came to going home.) In any case Chadwick had other things on his mind. Briskly but politely he did what he usually did with new researchers from overseas and sent the young man off to register as a member of the university and be assigned somewhere to live.
The University of Cambridge has many colleges, most of them of ancient foundation, and it was to Trinity that Walton made his way. This was the largest and the richest of them all, but it was also the college most closely associated with the Cavendish. Walton was duly accepted there by the senior tutor, who sent him on to the junior bursar, who after a short interview dispatched him to number 4 Park Parade, a few streets away at the north end of town, to view some lodgings that had just been vacated. Walton liked these. 'They are very clean,' he wrote to his father, 'and the sitting room, which I have to myself; is very comfortable. It is completely furnished and has two easy chairs and a small Chesterfield.' The bedroom, upstairs in a sort of attic, was less commodious and the bed was hard, but the rent, at per term, was considerably cheaper than rooms in college, and within his budget. Breakfasts and the use of his gas fire, he noted, were not included in the price and the electric light was also an extra, at er term. The rest of his day was filled with collecting his trunk from the station and opening an account at the Westminster Bank, and in the evening Walton had his first experience of dinner in college, a five-course affair beginning at what he considered the late hour of 8 p.m. It impressed him greatly and he could not help drawing the comparison with his alma mater, Trinity College, Dublin. 'There is a huge dining hall and the place is swarming with waiters, in fact the style leaves T.C.D. far behind. You can order almost anything you like either in the hall or to be sent round to your rooms . . . but of course it all appears on the bill.'
The following morning he found his way once again to the laboratory and met Rutherford himself. He did not record his first impressions of the great man except to say that he seemed 'very nice', but an Australian student who arrived that same autumn, Mark Oliphant, has left a vivid picture of a young researcher's first encounter with the Cavendish professor.
When my turn came, I entered a small office littered with books and papers, the desk cluttered in a manner which I had been taught at school indicated an untidy and inefficient mind. It was raining, and drops of water ran reluctantly down the grime-covered glass of the uncurtained window. I was received genially by a large, rather florid man, with thinning fair hair and a large moustache, who reminded me forcibly of the keeper of the general store and post office in a little village in the hills behind Adelaide where I had spent part of my childhood. Rutherford made me feel welcome and at ease at once. He spluttered a little as he talked, from time to time holding a match to a pipe which produced smoke and ash like a volcano.
Walton had sent ahead of him an account of the M.Sc. research he had done in Dublin and after the opening formalities the professor referred to this. The work was not in atomic physics but hydrodynamics and Rutherford said he had showed it to a colleague in that field who liked it a great deal. In particular he had praised the photographs Walton had been able to take of a curious effect in water, believing they were the clearest of their kind to date. This was the best sort of impression to make, for to Rutherford nothing was so important as to be able to carry off an experiment well. There seems to have been no hesitancy in the professor's welcome either, despite the problems over the application, and so when Walton bade Rutherford farewell and stepped out of that scruffy, smoke-filled office he was able to go straight upstairs and take his place in the laboratory's induction course. In this quiet way he joined what was a remarkable community.
There was nowhere in the world quite like the Cavendish. Founded in 1874 with funds from the Devonshire family, it was already, in 1927, a place of illustrious tradition. All Four of its directors had been of international stature, physicists who remain to this day, if not quite household names, at least prominent in the histories and textbooks. Rutherford's immediate predecessor, Joseph John Thomson, or 'J. J.' as he was known, had discovered the electron. Thomson had succeeded Lord Rayleigh, an experimenter who broke new ground in the study of light and sound and was the discoverer of the noble gas, argon. And Rayleigh's predecessor, the first director, was James Clerk Maxwell, the great Scottish theorist of electromagnetism and a heroic figure in nineteenth-century science. The thrill of a heritage so rich, accumulated in barely half a century, must have impressed itself upon every young researcher entering the workrooms and lecture theatres of the laboratory, but the reputation of the Cavendish did not depend on history alone. Including Rutherford himself, in 1927 there were three Nobel prizewinners on the staff and a fourth researcher was to receive the prize that winter, while among the younger scientists a further four or five (including Chadwick) were already acknowledged as world leaders in their fields. Such concentration of talent was exceptional in a world where the age of gentlemen researchers working alone in private laboratories was fresh in many memories, but under Rutherford's leadership the laboratory in Free School Lane had grown accustomed to taking its own path.
There was the matter of numbers: by the standards of the time the Cavendish was a veritable factory for postgraduate physicists. Each year it admitted fifteen or more, roughly half of whom had taken their primary degrees at Cambridge. Of the rest a few came from other British universities but most were from overseas, principally Canada, Australia and New Zealand but also the United States, India, Japan, Italy, Russia and other European countries. At any given time, then, there were around forty people carrying out postgraduate research and in the context of the British university scene in the 1920s this was mass production. What the Cavendish expected of them was that they would do original work, suitably supervised and if possible published, and then leave with a Ph.D. if they were good enough. Some would need three years for this but others who had already done research at their previous university might be out in two. The objective in educational terms was straightforward, as Chadwick was to explain: 'We hoped that they would get the proper attitude to research [and] acquire the ability to tackle any problem in physics.' Thus equipped, they might go to other universities, to industry or government service or into schoolteaching, while one or two in each year who showed particular promise would stay on as researcher-lecturers if space and funds could be found. Besides this general goal of raising the national competence in science and spreading the word, the laboratory and its director had an additional objective, and this was another distinguishing mark of the Cavendish.
Rutherford once observed that all true science was physics and the rest was stamp collecting. Within the walls of his own laboratory he took this approach one step further, relegating all physics that did not concern itself with the atom to the philatelic category. Rutherford and Chadwick deliberately directed the work of the Cavendish towards the study of the interior of the atom, and so far as was practical towards the nucleus. Barring a few senior figures pursuing their own inquiries and a handful of cases among the students, all the researchers were therefore rowing in the same direction, to the same beat, and the result was a domination of the subject that amounted almost to monopoly.
Between the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 and the end of the First World War most of the experimental work on the atom had been done in three countries: Britain (with its dominions), Germany and France, with Britain making the largest contribution. The war and its aftermath severely disrupted Germany's efforts, and though research in the United States was slowly growing in scale and ambition there is no doubt that as the 1920s advanced British dominance increased markedly--and in Britain it was Cambridge that was making the running. Atomic physics was widely viewed as the most exciting field in all science and if you were a young researcher hoping to make a contribution, then no matter where in the world you came from your best course was to get yourself to the Cavendish.
So it had been with Ernest Walton. He was the son of a Methodist minister who, following the policy of the Church, moved frequently between parishes in Ireland. It had been natural, therefore, to send the boy off to boarding school in Belfast for his education and there he proved a star pupil, with a special talent and enthusiasm for science and mathematics and also a gift for making things. One family story has him reading geometry textbooks at home for pleasure, while on his birthdays he liked to be given tools to equip what grew into a sophisticated home workshop. A surviving school report describes him as 'swift, sure, penetrating and comprehensive as thinker and worker', and declares that he showed 'brilliant promise'. Sure enough, when he found his way to university in Dublin he carried all before him in mathematics and physics and on graduating in 1926 (with first-class degrees in both subjects) he stayed on as a postgraduate, choosing physics for the practical reason that it allowed him to use his hands as well as his brain. His research supervisor set him the task of studying the flow of liquids past cylinders, a matter of importance in civil engineering and aeronautics. The effect of this flow was known--it created twin groups of vortices in the liquid, like chains of small whirlpools--but Walton's job was to measure and explain it. Using an elegant apparatus of his own creation he photographed the vortices at each stage in their progress and then described the rules governing their formation and behaviour. This project was still under way when he learned of a much grander career possibility: a scholarship that might enable him to work under Rutherford.
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