The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom - Softcover

Cathcart, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374530262 ISBN 13: 9780374530266

Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

"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.

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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.

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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 field...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374530262
• ISBN 13: 9780374530266
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar