Volume 2, Number 7 · May 14, 1964
Ernest Rutherford
By Robert Oppenheimer
Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom
by E.N.da C. Andrade
Anchor, 213 pp., $1.25
This Anchor paperback is a biography of the physicist Ernest Rutherford. The author is himself a noted physicist and metallurgist. He worked with Rutherford as a student and associate in perhaps the most exciting days of Rutherford's many: in the years just before 1914, in Manchester, after Rutherford had discovered the atomic nucleus. Moseley was there, showing that the characteristic X-rays of the elements provided a direct measurement of nuclear charge and atomic number, and thus 'calling the roll' of the elements Niels Bohr was also in Manchester, facing the implications of the nuclear atom for atomic structure, a structure unintelligible in terms of Newtonian dynamics, and calling for such new descriptions as stationary states, transitions between them, and quantum conditions determining the energy of the states in terms of the electron's mass and charge, and the quantum of action that 'governed' the atom. The author is a polished and experienced lecturer; he is a poet; he is an historian of science. Few biographers can have as engaging and noble a subject.
Review, 1814 words
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