Chadwick’s discovery had given new impetus to the public interest in sub-atomic science, which now expanded along with Rutherford’s public profile. A poll of Britain’s best brains conducted by The Spectator magazine in 1930 had ranked him bottom of the seven scientists on the list, and well below H. G. Wells, Churchill and the runaway winner, the playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw.28 After 1932, Rutherford could have expected to fare rather better, especially as the discovery of the neutron turned out to be only the beginning of his Indian summer.
Late in the afternoon of Wednesday 28 April 1932, Lindemann was on his way to a special meeting where his nose would be rubbed into his professional inferiority. Rutherford had invited him to be a platform speaker at a gathering of British atomic physicists held in the Royal Society’s headquarters in Piccadilly. Billed as a review of the latest findings about atomic nuclei, the meeting was sure to be a regatta of Cavendish showboating, though Lindemann and most of the other participants had no idea that Rutherford was planning another spectacular scoop.
From the beginning of the proceedings Rutherford was in his pomp, delivering a bravura tour d’horizon of nuclear physics. The audience probably then expected him to hand over to Chadwick, the man of the moment, but Rutherford surprised them when he cast aside his pre-circulated script and announced that two of his ‘boys’ had taken one of his own experiments a step further. In 1917, in breaks between his war work, he had become the first successful alchemist when he converted nitrogen into oxygen by bombarding nitrogen nuclei with helium nuclei emitted from a radioactive source. In common parlance, he had split the atom – a finding so surprising that he spent over a year checking it.29 Pleased as punch, Rutherford reported that two of his young colleagues, the Englishman John Cockcroft and the Irishman Ernest Walton, had split the atom with artificially produced beams of particles.
Using a proton beam shot from a purpose-built particle accelerator, Cockcroft and Walton had bombarded lithium nuclei and transmuted some of them into two helium nuclei. The two virtually unknown young physicists had begun one of the most productive techniques of modern particle physics, probing deep into the heart of matter by bombarding sub-atomic particles with as much energy as could be mustered.30 As a bonus, Cockcroft and Walton’s results gave the first direct confirmation of Einstein’s equation E=mc2, which enabled the energy of the process to be fully accounted for. A few days later, they demonstrated this to Einstein himself, who soon after wrote of his visit to the experiment and his ‘astonishment and admiration’.31
Rutherford could not talk in detail about the discovery as it was under wraps until Nature, the house journal of British science, published it. But he said enough to draw applause when, with a sweeping hand gesture, he asked Cockcroft and Walton to stand up. Lindemann knew that this latest discovery underlined once again the superiority of the Cambridge physics department over his own, which was so backward when he arrived that it lacked even a proper supply of electricity.32 Nuclear physics was not one of his strong suits, so it was perhaps cruel of Rutherford to invite him to speak, and perhaps foolhardy of Lindemann to accept and make a contribution that was only a notch above footling.33
Two days later, Rutherford was back in Piccadilly, giving an after-dinner speech at the Royal Academy of Arts’ annual banquet, attended by royalty, foreign ambassadors and ministers, and hundreds of dignitaries, including the elderly composer Edward Elgar.34 Rutherford, elated after Nature’s publication of Cockcroft and Walton’s paper that day, sat at the top table close to Winston Churchill. It is no surprise that they got on well:35 each had a penchant for independent-minded high achievers, and they were both unabashed supporters of the British Empire, with a Falstaffian presence at the dinner table.36 Churchill made ‘a strong impression’ on Rutherford, telling him that Hitler was a man riding a tiger.37 The acquaintance between the men, however, went no further – it would not have been easy to yoke together in friendship two such rampant egos.
The first speakers at the event – including Prince George, a son of the King – fretted about Britain’s broken economy and suggested feebly how the arts might help. It was left to Churchill to lighten the evening. In a perfectly judged speech comparing the Academy with Parliament, he soon had the banquet hall in gusts of laughter. He spoke with his usual blend of pride and self-deprecation about his differences with the current Tory leadership, likening himself to an art teacher who, having fallen out with the Academy’s organising committee, was ‘not exhibiting this season’.38
After the gathering toasted ‘Science’, Rutherford responded with his usual spirit, taking an ill-informed swipe at the new ‘metaphysical’ thinking in theoretical physics and risking one speculation that probably went down well with his audience: ‘A strong claim could be made that the process of scientific discovery might be regarded as a form of art.’39 He was probably pleased to read these words quoted in the Observer the following morning, though he was in a grumpy mood. Despite a press embargo, the story of Cockcroft and Walton’s triumph had been broken by the populist Reynolds’s Illustrated News, which announced it in the lead article on its front page, riddled with errors and hyperbole.40 A posse of journalists and photographers was standing expectantly outside the Cavendish early the next morning. Rutherford refused to oblige them with an interview or permission to enter the building, but eventually consented to pose briefly with his protégés outside the laboratory. The result was a classic image: two tired but thrilled young physicists alongside that monster, spruce in his Homburg hat and loose-fitting three-piece suit, proud as a new grandfather.
The discovery was reported in all the leading British newspapers, most of them unsure what it presaged – the Daily Mirror commented, ‘Let [the atom] be split, so long as it does not explode.’41 Most of the articles on the discovery reported correctly that when Cockcroft and Walton split a nucleus, they got out more energy than they put in. Yet almost all the reports ignored or glossed over the crucial point that their protons hit the target only once in every ten million shots – much more energy was wasted than released.42 ‘Surely I have explained often enough that the nucleus is a sink, not a source of energy!’ Rutherford roared.43 He filed most of the speculative articles and even kept a few of them folded in a trouser pocket, telling the journalist Ritchie Calder that they were all ‘drivel’ and ‘rot’.44
Even before Cockcroft and Walton had published their experiment, its consequences were being talked about by actors on the London stage. At the West End’s Globe Theatre, the creaking melodrama Wings Over Europe considered how a British government might deal with scientists flaunting the power to use nuclear weapons. The play had opened on 27 April, the day before the Royal Society meeting on nuclear physics. Written by the American Robert Nichols and the English Maurice Browne, Wings Over Europe had premiered successfully on Broadway some three years before and had then been performed across America.45 The action focuses on a hyperactive young scientist who, having discovered how to unleash nuclear energy, attempts to dictate policy about the new resource to the Cabinet. When he fails, he threatens blackmail but ends up shot in the heart by the Secretary of State for War. In the closing seconds, the politicians receive a message from the ‘United Scientists of the World’, declaring that they too know the scientist’s secret and that, unless world leaders can agree on the wise use of the new energy source, atomic bombs will be dropped all over the world. The London critics were sniffy, though several pointed out the play’s prescience. Desmond MacCarthy, critic for the New Statesman and Nation, went so far as to say that society was now at a turning point:46
The destiny of mankind has slipped from the hands of politicians (we are all aware of it) to the hands of scientists, who know not what they do, but pass responsibility for results on to those whose sense of proportion and knowledge are inadequate to the situations created by science.
When journalists tried to link Cockcroft and Walton’s discovery with the moral questions raised in Wings Over Europe, Rutherf
ord and his colleagues found the debate distasteful and declined to join it, underlining MacCarthy’s point.
The fears were fanned again a few months later by the publication of the satirical novel Public Faces, about a future British government’s handling of newly available ‘atomic bombs’. One of the characters was Winston Churchill. The book’s author Harold Nicolson, a diplomat and a former member of Oswald Mosley’s New Party, had begun to write it shortly before Wings Over Europe opened in London. Nicolson’s story takes place during a June weekend in 1939, about eighteen months after the ‘disastrous’ adventurist government run by Churchill and Mosley has been ousted. The new, brittle British government learns that it is possible to make atomic bombs, each no bigger than an inkstand, using metal available only in one of its colonies in the Middle East. When France, Germany, Russia and the US oppose the monopoly, panicked officials worry whether Churchill and ‘his crowd’ know about the atomic bomb and will criticise their timidity. In the farcical climax, a foretaste of Dr Strangelove, the Cabinet hears that a nuclear bomb has been accidentally dropped three miles east of the Carolinas, killing thousands of Americans. The British government soon agrees to destroy its atomic bombs and to stop manufacturing them.
Public Faces was a hit with critics in Britain and the United States, and had soon sold tens of thousands of copies. Nicolson had helped to bring the possibility of ‘atomic bombs’ to public attention, though it was still not a popular talking point, not least because Rutherford and other experts declined to give the theme the slightest encouragement.
At the annual Cavendish Dinner shortly before Christmas, Rutherford and his ‘boys’ always let their hair down – in 1932 they had especially good reason to celebrate. After a splendid meal in Trinity College of filet mignon, roast goose and cognac-laced mince pies, topped off with a canapé marinière in case anyone still had an appetite, Rutherford stood to give his usual toast to ‘the Laboratory’.47 He and his ‘boys’ had seen some lean years, but the Cavendish was completing perhaps the greatest year in its history. Fortified by fine wines and spirits, he may have struggled to hold back the news that yet another banner-headline discovery was ready to be announced.48
Rutherford was now the most admired scientist in the country. He was, in Einstein’s words, ‘one of the greatest experimental physicists of all time, and in the same class as Faraday’.49 No less impressive than Rutherford’s strength as a scientist was his ability to cultivate the talent of his ‘boys’, most of whom regarded him as a hero and tried in some ways to emulate him. Within a few decades, several of them would play central roles in the story of how nuclear energy was used, militarily and commercially.
Although the New Zealander had his shortcomings as a friend and colleague, he got on well with all his associates and peers. Except one: in the next few years, he came to loathe Frederick Lindemann.50
MARCH 1933 TO DECEMBER 1934
The Prof advises ‘a scientist who missed his vocation’
‘[Lindemann] is a genuinely horrible figure . . . He is the only person, I think, whom I have ardently wished to murder.’
ISAIAH BERLIN, 19361
‘In his peculiar and indefinable way, Old Prof was a good sport.’
JAMES TUCK, 19612
In the late afternoon of Wednesday 15 March 1933, Winston Churchill was preparing to take a few hours away from Parliament, to chair a talk on nuclear physics. The event, in aid of charity, was to take place in Mulberry House, a Westminster mansion where Frederick Lindemann was to lecture on ‘Some Recent Discoveries in Science’. Lady Forbes-Robertson, Lord Ratendone, the Dowager Lady Swaythling and Lady Cynthia Mosley, wife of Britain’s most prominent Fascist, were among the blue bloods who had bought tickets for what promised to be a singular event in the season’s calendar. By five-thirty, most of the guests were sipping their pre-talk cocktails and getting ready to take their seats.
On an occasion like this, Churchill was careful to look his best – an extra shave, a clean shirt, a splash of lavender water.3 He was probably feeling cheerful that afternoon as his name was all over the newspapers, following a well-received speech he had given on the state of Britain’s air defences. A few weeks before, he had been buoyed by the arrival in the White House of Franklin Roosevelt, who began to implement his New Deal with an expeditiousness that Churchill found deeply impressive.
The owner of Mulberry House, Lord Melchett, then in his mid-thirties, was a veteran of the Great War. A writer and poet whose aspirations were rather greater than his talent, he was also a director and part owner of Imperial Chemical Industries. The wealth he had recently inherited from his father was reflected in the opulence of his home’s new refurbishments, much admired in London society: Greek marbles and vases, monumental images from ancient legends carved into walls of travertine stone, bronze doors with polished marble architraves.4 Melchett knew Lindemann well and had appointed him to a lucrative membership of ICI’s Research Council, a luncheon club that brought together some of the company’s scientists with senior academics.5
Lindemann was a popular figure at this type of event.6 It was rare for the nobility to have among them such a distinguished figure from the scientific elite, especially one who so relished being in their company and who conformed so willingly to their conventions. He was well known for his fascination with society news, his quiet effervescence, and for the high-pitched grunt that always followed the punchlines of his jokes.
When Churchill introduced the talk, he probably praised the Prof’s skills as an expositor. But Lindemann’s ability as a speaker was limited. His soft drone often barely carried beyond the front few rows, leaving audience members at the back struggling to keep their eyes open.7 That evening, however, he appears to have been on his best form. He began with a stimulating, two-minute tribute to Churchill, including this encomium to his intellect:8
[Churchill] has pre-eminently the synthetic mind which makes every new piece of knowledge interlock with previous knowledge: where the more ordinary brain puts each new experience to the scrap heap, he insists on fitting it into the structure of the cantilever jutting out over the abyss of ignorance.
When Lindemann turned to nuclear physics, he stressed that he would avoid ‘mystical questions’. It was rare for him to speak for long without flaying other people’s sloppy thinking, so it was no surprise that he quickly found fault in most reports of Cockcroft and Walton’s experiment, ‘which the newspapers so inaccurately describe as “Splitting the Atom”’ (he was right – the duo had split atomic nuclei, not atoms). Aware that most of his listeners barely knew what atoms were, he went back to basics, setting out the types of particle from which atoms were then believed to be made – the electrically charged electron and proton, and Chadwick’s electrically neutral neutron, which Lindemann dubbed ‘the eunuch’. Like most other scientists presenting to non-specialists, he went out of his way to quash fears that the atom-splitting experiments would set off some sort of global conflagration. The important point was that they clarified our understanding of matter – this was why he added nuclear physics to his department’s already wide portfolio of interests.9
He moved on to the scientific topic of the day, the amazing photographs of showers of cosmic rays raining down on Earth, taken by two of Rutherford’s ‘boys’, the Englishman Patrick Blackett and his Italian colleague ‘Beppo’ Occhialini.10 This last of the hat-trick of great discoveries at the Cavendish may have been painful for Lindemann – the two experimenters had designed and built just the kind of device the Prof admired for its cunning design and brilliant efficacy. Their technique of making charged cosmic rays photograph themselves as they passed through a detector had rendered the competition obsolete and made it relatively easy to detect antimatter, until then extremely elusive. It probably did not make things any easier for Lindemann that he had met Blackett, an outspoken Socialist, and taken an instant dislike to him.11
When Lindemann sat down, Churchill rose to give the vote of thanks. The audience wa
s soon laughing, though his jokes about splitting the atom and Bohr’s atomic model were uncharacteristically lame. He nonetheless successfully drove home the essential point: although the new discoveries looked complicated, in the main the march of scientific thought and discovery was not towards an ever greater heap of ideas, but towards simplification.
Among the press representatives in the audience, the Daily Telegraph’s reporter was impressed by Churchill’s skill in his ‘new role’ of reducing abstruse science to its simplest terms. The next morning, the Telegraph featured an article entitled ‘Splitting the Atom’, with the sub-headline ‘Mr Churchill’s aid to science’, concentrating on his light-hearted summary.12 The reporter had been struck by Churchill’s comment about how marvellous it was that the new particles could be manipulated ‘as if they were animals in the Zoological Gardens’. Apparently echoing Churchill’s conclusion, the article ended by positing that the results of the new research ‘at any moment might break upon the world and almost certainly revolutionise the life of man’. One possible revolution would involve the use of nuclear energy to make bombs. Although Lindemann had dismissed chatter about the imminent arrival of nuclear weapons, in the next few years he would see that such notions were not so far-fetched. As Germany and other European countries became more repressive and racist, he helped to provide sanctuary for refugee scientists who later played crucial roles in raising awareness that nuclear weapons might soon be built and be in Hitler’s hands.
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