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The Fly in the Cathedral : How A Small Group of Cambridge Scientists Won The Race to Split the Atom |
List Price: $25.00
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Reviews |
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Rating: Summary: Exciting account of atomic sudies and early quantum theory Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Maybe it is just me, I relish Scientific American and I as an engineer and I have always been interested in technology and its history. This book made me feel like I was working with Walton and Cockcroft under Rutherford at the famous Cavendish labs in England as they toiled to build a proton accelerator to smash the nucleus before other labs could beat them with cyclotrons and Van de Graf generators. It was an exciting race. It explains how to build a rectifier for 700kv out of huge hand made vacuum tubes. All the big names in early quantum mechanics make an appearance. The politics, the challenges, etc. I highly recommend it.
Rating: Summary: The Beginning of Nuclear Physics Review: People had always thought that solid matter was, well, solid. It was only when scientists had an understanding of what atoms were that they began to realize that there were huge spaces between atoms. Later they got to understand that an atom itself consisted mostly of empty space, a big outer shell where electrons whizzed around, containing only a tiny nucleus. The image of the big shell and the tiny nucleus was given by comparison, a comparison that gives the title to _The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Brian Cathcart. Actually, the atom had been split long before, if the atom, which had been considered indivisible, is split by chipping electrons off that outer cathedral-like shell. But "splitting the atom" has long had the real meaning of splitting the nucleus, and this is the intriguing story of the stolid, energetic and gentlemanly scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge who in 1932 brought forth the birth of nuclear physics.
The commanding presence in the book, just as he was as he oversaw the lab, is Sir Earnest Rutherford, a "barreling, thundering, penetrating presence in the world of physics, a great rowdy boy full of ideas and energy." He was thrilled by the ardor of the chase in scientific exploration, and he was an ingenious experimenter, although he was often clumsy with apparatus. In 1927, Rutherford as its president addressed the Royal Society, proposing a new way forward for solving the problem of the composition of the nucleus. If it were possible to accelerate particles artificially, he said, by huge voltages of electricity, they could be slammed against the nucleus and the scattered wreckage analyzed. This sounds completely sensible now, but there was no equipment that could produce such accelerations. The two heroes of this book, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, worked in Rutherford's lab, and were easily persuaded to join the chase. Cockcroft was so quiet that his children eventually made the rule that "Daddy could not leave the dinner table until he had uttered two whole sentences." He was superb at designing and making experimental equipment that no one else had thought of before, but was not the experimenter that Rutherford would have liked. Walton was. Another quiet man, he was the son of a minister and a devout Methodist who shunned any activity that might be called frivolous. He came up with the idea of accelerating particles electrically on his own, and when he proposed such work to his boss, Rutherford was of course delighted. In 1932, after almost four years of patient, frustrating, exhausting, and inspiring work, protons bombarded a strip of lithium, and the lithium nucleus cracked open into two helium nuclei.
Part of the charm of this book is that it describes work done in a scientific atmosphere that was like none found today. Rutherford, even though a hard taskmaster, insisted that at six at night, everyone had to go home. He would not have his researchers overextend themselves, and at that time, all circuits were switched off, no matter what experiment was in progress. He did, however, allow this strict curfew to be waived once Walton and Cockcroft had made their initial findings, so that they could confirm them and rush into print ahead of the other experimenters in other nations that were trying to break down the nucleus as well. The two experimenters did not exactly become household names, like, say, Watson and Crick, but there was some (often misdirected) praise from the press, and they got plenty of recognition from their peers. Albert Einstein visited the lab and was thrilled with what he saw; incidentally, the experiment was the first laboratory verification of his famous equation E = mc^2. It took almost twenty years, but Walton and Cockcroft were awarded Nobel prizes, which also failed to make them famous. Modest, quiet, gray scientists, they probably were happy to have it that way.
Rating: Summary: Splitting the atom was never so much fun Review: The Fly in the Cathedral takes the microscope to Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory in the late 1920s-early 1930s, a period of explosive growth in physics and, in particular, nuclear physics. The knowledge we so take for granted today - that the nucleus (the "fly") is comprised of neutrons and protons with electrons occupying certain energy levels far from the nucleus (the "cathedral") - was suspected but never proven conclusively by the mid 1920s.
The author, Brian Cathcart, does a credible job at introducing the main players - Ernest Walton, John Cockcroft, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick - and evinces their personalities by describing their manner of working and by examining their interactions with others. The overwhelming impression is of very modest men making extremely immodest progress in understanding the very fundamentals of nature. Indeed, they all went on to win Nobel prizes; the sheer brain power of these men is inspiring.
The subject matter of the book might be nuclear physics but the author does a terrific job of explaining things and provides some very neat analogies to help the reader, such as describing continuous functions like temperature as "milk" and discontinuous things like quanta of energy as "eggs". In context, this makes a lot of sense for readers without the benefit of a background in physics or chemistry. Those who do understand the essentials of nuclear physics will not feel condescended.
Rutherford was the head of the Cavendish Laboratory during this period and his group proved two important things: Chadwick of the existence of the neutron and Walton & Cockcroft the "splitting" of the atom, although technically they weren't splitting so much as cleaving. Rutherford's mind is described as "like the bow of a battleship. There was so much weight behind it, it had no need to be sharp as a razor." With a battleship driving their research, is it any wonder Rutherford's group succeeded?
This is a great book for the lover of science. It is easily digestable and leaves the reader with a real sense of wonderment at just how incredible nature is and how determined men can be in deciphering her. If you like this book you will almost certainly enjoy "Genius" by James Gleick too, it's one of my all-time favorite books.
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