"The Fly in the Cathedral": A look back at splitting the atom

[pmbryant]

From the NY Times:

'The Fly in the Cathedral': Make Way for Big Science
By RICHARD PANEK

WALTON and Cockcroft: the names don't carry quite the same historic resonance as Watson and Crick. Yet the most enduring work of Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft -- splitting the nucleus of the atom -- can hold its own with the discovery of DNA's structure among the turning points of 20th-century science, and now, with Brian Cathcart's ''Fly in the Cathedral,'' they even get their own ''Double Helix,'' sort of.

In that unlikely 1968 best seller, James Watson created a new kind of popular science book, one that unveils the human side of science -- the ambition, pride, ill will and possible thievery that, arguably, play as great a role in revolutionary breakthroughs as objective evaluations of empirical evidence do. Ambition, pride, ill will and possible thievery might well have played a role at Cambridge in 1932 -- 21 years before Watson and Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub there one lunchtime and famously crowed that they'd just discovered the secret of life -- but you wouldn't know it from the historical record. Back in the early 1930's, young university researchers in Britain were still taking direction from the last vestiges of what Cathcart calls ''the age of the gentleman scientist,'' from pillars of probity who manned their workbenches with a seemingly thorough disregard for the outside world -- the scientific equivalent of a stiff upper lip.

For Walton and Cockcroft, that pillar was Sir Ernest Rutherford. At a time when physicists had begun to challenge the prevailing model of the atom as a kind of permeable pudding filled with plumlike electrons, it was Rutherford who arrived at an alternate model, one consisting almost entirely of empty space. The outermost electrons, Rutherford proposed, would define the farthest boundary of this near void, while a nucleus, dense enough to deflect a few incoming particles yet compact enough so that the vast majority would miss, would reside at the center like ''a gnat in the Albert Hall,'' in Rutherford's words. Or, in a popular analogy of the day, like a fly in a cathedral. In 1929 Rutherford, by then the director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, assigned Walton and Cockcroft the task of catching that fly and splitting it.

They weren't alone. Several competitors in the States were also trying to swat the nucleus, a pursuit that inaugurated not only a new theoretical era of nuclear physics, but a new technological era of ''big physics.'' The kind of equipment Walton, Cockcroft and their contemporaries had to improvise would never again fit on one gentleman's workbench. Today some particle accelerators are so vast, Cathcart writes, they ''may be seen from space.''

...

But in the end, they got the credit. Einstein himself said that E = mc2 was demonstrated experimentally by Cockcroft and Walton in 1932. In 1951 they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. And thanks to Cathcart's meticulous reconstruction of their finest hour, they're now enjoying a further moment of glory. As characters, however, Walton and Cockcroft were no Watson and Crick.

They were, for better or worse, gentlemen.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/books/review/09PANEKL.html?oref=login