If there is an afterlife for physicists it will certainly include conferences pulling together luminaries from across the centuries: “Newton, you really must meet Einstein, he’s over there by the registration desk. I know you’ll have lots to talk about.”
My Good Place may well be your Bad Place, but any physicist’s post-mortem bucket list has to include Ernest Rutherford, born 150 years ago on Monday, August 30th. You know those little cartoon atoms that are a graphical shorthand for “science”? The key idea they express – the central nucleus wrapped by a cloud of electrons – is Rutherford’s. The proton? Discovered by Rutherford and his collaborators. Turning the atom of one element into another, fulfilling the dreams of alchemists? Also Rutherford.
New Zealanders talk about “tall poppy syndrome”, whereby we cut down successful individuals for daring to rise above the rest of the field. But we also stretch some poppies to their limits, as seen in our love of Olympic medal tables computed on a per capita basis. Consequently, growing up with a passion for science I was never certain whether Rutherford was fully famous or just a local lad made good.
I shouldn’t have doubted. Nobel Prizes are awarded every year but insights as big as “the world is made of atoms” and “atoms are built from smaller, simpler objects” may arrive only once a century, and Rutherford has a big share of both breakthroughs. He is truly the real deal.
Rutherdford’s story starts on a farm near Nelson, followed by studies at Canterbury in Christchurch, and ends with him at Cambridge. But his full CV is the classic trajectory of the peripatetic scholar: he headed to Cambridge for his PhD in 1894, began a decade as a professor at McGill in Montreal in 1898, moved to Manchester in 1908, before finally returning to Cambridge in 1919.
In fact, one testimonial to Rutherford’s impact became apparent to me on a visit to McGill, where I was told to make my way to the Rutherford Building, which was the home of their Department of Physics. My PhD is from Canterbury in New Zealand where I did my research in their “Rutherford Building”. Manchester and Cambridge likewise each have their own Rutherford Building. Having just one building named after you is a rare achievement – Rutherford collected this honour at each place he stopped, a remarkable architectural Grand Slam.
If you guessed that as a student Rutherford was a colonial rough diamond let loose in late-Victorian Cambridge you would be right. He was subject to the predictable resentments and exclusions that came with this status, even if his sheer brilliance tipped the scales back in his favour. However, it must have been sweet to return to Cambridge as a full professor and then rise to the pinnacle of British science as president of the Royal Society in the 1920s. Rutherford appears to be a man who greatly enjoyed his life so I doubt he held a significant grudge. (Also, his Manchester salary reputedly made him the highest-paid academic in the United Kingdom and Cambridge had to stretch to match it.)
Rutherford is repeatedly described as “energetic”, “a force of nature” and a “boy” – very much in the positive sense of someone who brought both energy and wonder to everything he did. He was also loud. There is a famous photograph of him in a Cambridge lab filled with sensitive equipment. There is a sign above his head saying “Talk Softly Please”, that was reputedly installed for the benefit of the “the prof”. Another story claims that the one song he knew was “Onward Christian Soldiers” – and only the lyrics but not the tune – and that he once paraded around the room (in a different, earlier lab) performing it at the top of lungs after a successful experiment. This also appears to have been the full extent of his engagement with organised religion.
