The Rutherford Memorial Lecture, 1957

Abstract

It is just fifty years since Rutherford took up his appointment as Langworthy Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester and there established the school of research which was to be so fruitful in great discoveries. It is less than iffy years since he first put forward the nuclear scheme of the structure of the atom. The spirit, the scale, the structure and, above all, the organization and [administration of research in physics has changed so much in these fifty years that the discoveries in question may truly be said to belong to another age, an age so remote as to seem closer to the times of Goethe and of Beethoven than to those of T. S. Eliot and of William Walton. It appeared to me possible that the aspiring young, among whom are numbered the Rutherfords of the future, might be interested to consider certain notable doings of that distant age, while they can still dear of them from one who was himself young at the time in question. I have therefore taken as my theme, for the Rutherford Memorial Lecture, the birth of the nuclear atom, which dominates so much of the physics of today. And, as, in dealing with any notable birth, it is usual and proper to say something about ancestry, I shall begin with those early speculations on the structure of the atom which led up to the conception of Rutherford's model.