The Basis of Everything

by Andrew Ramsey

  Having flourished as a researcher under Thomson in conditions even more austere than those he came to preside over, Rutherford felt that noble poverty produced more worthwhile results than pampered luxury. That view extended to seeking additional funds that might supplement the Cavendish’s always inadequate budget. He was stubbornly unwilling to beg for assistance in any form, other than for his coveted supplies of radioactive source materials.

  His gruff reminders as to the evils of excess had become legend by the time Oliphant arrived. ‘We don’t have much money, therefore we must think’ was a refrain he trotted out with similar fondness to his grating renditions of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. While a research student at the Cavendish, Philip Moon found himself in need of liquid air as a coolant for work he was pursuing. On learning of another request lodged for that resource, Rutherford pronounced in his rumbling baritone: ‘the time has come, Mr Moon, to decide whether the results you are getting are worth the liquid air you are using’.15

  Furthermore, Rutherford maintained that his thirty or so research students would develop stronger investigative protocols and deeper experimental insights if they designed and built their own counters, amplifiers and power supplies, rather than simply plucking them from a manufacturer’s shelf.

  Baron Bowden, who completed his Cambridge doctorate in nuclear physics at the height of the laboratory’s golden era in the 1930s, regarded researchers at the Cavendish as ‘the most impecunious I’ve ever known’. Chadwick, Rutherford’s trusted and loyal subordinate, once confided to a colleague: ‘You would be surprised to know what this laboratory has been running on for the past few years, less than some men spend on tobacco.’16

  Oliphant’s examination of the properties of positive ions and the separation of isotopes through electromagnetism soon demanded a metal mercury diffusion pump superior in performance to the Hivac he had sought from Chadwick. His only options were to find the necessary £24 – almost ten per cent of his annual income – or proceed without. The pump was duly purchased. On other occasions, he was forced to buy a glass-blowing torch, secure supplies of rare gases, and pay for reprints of papers he had no choice but to type himself.

  He chose to spend the money that he and Rosa could scarcely afford because science was everything to him. And at the core of that devotion lay the deeply personal nexus he had formed with his reason for being there: Ernest Rutherford.

  9

  A MEETING OF MINDS

  North Wales and Cambridge, 1928 to 1932

  The vista from the bank of windows set into the thick stone walls of the seventeenth-century Welsh longhouse, perched part-way up the eastern rise of the Nant Gwynant valley, seemed to stretch, unhindered, almost to New Zealand. Certainly, the spectral outline of Mount Snowdon, which loomed, treeless and mist-enshrouded, above the waterway that burbled across the valley floor, among emerald-green fields blotted only by disused slate quarries, was reminiscent of the volcanic hillscapes and high-country plains among which Rutherford had spent so many years, on the verdant South Island.

  He had taken a lease on the whitewashed farmhouse named ‘Celyn’ (pronounced ‘kaylin’) soon after he received his Nobel Prize purse in 1908. The homestead – essentially incorporating the footprint of three stone cottages joined under a single roof to form one dwelling that historically housed both humans and livestock – was more than 200 kilometres from Manchester, where he had lived at the time. And the Wolseley roadster also financed by the award had allowed the Rutherfords to retreat to North Wales whenever Ernest’s schedule allowed – at a minimum, for part of every university vacation period.

  As Chadwick noted of his close collaborator’s enduring love of nature:

  Rutherford was never so fully relaxed as when he was in the countryside. He was still a countryman as he had been in his youth . . . [and] he maintained that an active family should, every few years, leave the town and live in the country. His point was partly that one should get away from the tensions of urban life and so recharge one’s batteries but chiefly that one needed to regain contact with nature and the country life on which man ultimately depends.1

  ‘To one who knew the completeness of his immersion in his work while in the laboratory,’ Oliphant would remember of Rutherford, ‘his ability to put it aside and relax utterly while on holiday seemed remarkable. Moreover, he urged his colleagues and students to do likewise, often telling one who was obviously tired to go off for a complete break.’2

  Motoring had increasingly become another of Rutherford’s extracurricular joys. When he first took the Wolseley on the roads around Cheshire, near Manchester, he had delighted in pushing the vehicle to around twenty-five miles per hour (forty kilometres per hour). On his move to Cambridge, from where the journey to Celyn was closer to 350 kilometres, that top speed was regularly doubled. Those longer journeys required overnight stops with friends along the route, when Mary Rutherford would bluntly inform their hosts that she and Ernest would require sandwiches for their onward travels next morning. And upon receiving the order, would often peer into the contents and tersely complain, along the lines of ‘sardines – don’t like sardines – get me something else’.3

  By the time the Oliphants arrived at Cambridge in 1927, advances in both highway infrastructure and automotive technology meant that the distance could be covered in a single, albeit long and not altogether comfortable, day. Oliphant later noted that there was little of aesthetic interest in the countryside once past Shrewsbury, heading west into Wales.

  It was a long and arduous drive. The car was what is known to Americans as a convertible, with hood which could be folded back behind the seats in good weather. There was no heater or windscreen wiper, and when in winter it was at times necessary to drive through fog or a snowstorm, with the windscreen open, it was bitterly cold.

  Lady Rutherford’s passion for fresh air led to driving sometimes with the hood folded back in weather which any ordinary person would avoid. It was amusing to see them both wrapping up for such a drive in woollens, greatcoats, gloves and goggles, and with hot water bottles on the lap of the driver and at the feet of the rugged-up passenger.4

  With the Rutherfords’ daughter Eileen married to Ralph Fowler and raising her own family, holidays to the Welsh countryside came to comprise only the two Antipodean couples. As a result, Mark and Rosa Oliphant become de facto family for the Rutherfords when the older couple weren’t spending time with their grandchildren. And, despite the many mutualities of the two men’s professional lives, the relationship was never more effortlessly happy than when away from the laboratory, simply enjoying each other’s company.

  At Celyn, Mark and Rosa flaunted their comparative youth by tackling steep walking trails affording unhindered panoramas of the escarpments that rose, brooding and bare, above the treeline. These paths also provided spectacular views back down the valley, across the dark, still waters of stream-fed lakes Llyn Dinas and Llyn Gwynant, to the closest village of Beddgelert. On cool days, a thin blanket of white smoke wisped comfortingly across the slate roofs of the village’s dark stone homes.

  The Rutherfords would restrict themselves to the lower reaches, skirting fields that echoed with bleating sheep, or taking the short walk to the only nearby shop, where essentials, including a weekly bread delivery and locally churned butter, accounted for most of the available stock.

  Occasionally, all four would set out on the twelve-kilometre return walk to Beddgelert for more substantial supplies. Rutherford would inevitably give up when the party neared the halfway point at the most distant of Llyn Dinas’s rocky shores, and sit and stoke his pipe into life while waiting for the group to reappear. Consequently, that trip was more often completed by car.

  Come winter at Celyn, Rutherford rarely found it necessary to venture outdoors at all. Instead, he would settle into a deep lounge chair pulled up to the hearth and pass the days reading forwarded mail, newspapers and books on varied non-fiction topics. His insights into the demise of the region�
�s slate pits and the ultra-narrow gauge railway that had serviced them suggested that some of those texts were local histories.

  Oliphant’s memories of those calming days would remain as clear as the air that hung heavy with humidity during summer breaks, and numbingly chilled as sunlight hours reduced.

  The stone walls and floors of Celyn seemed always damp, and the bedrooms never warmed. The fine living room was heated with a coal fire, and in the cold and damp weather, Rutherford spent most of his time there. He wore a golfing suit with plus-fours and cloth cap. On a warm day, if he went for a walk, he perspired freely. By the time he demanded a rest, seated on a convenient rock, he was breathless and often irritable.

  In spring, foxgloves in every shade of colour fringed the stone walls and rocks, and grass sprouted green once more, and the lambs gambolled about their mothers. In summer, it could be very hot in the valley, but the weather was unpredictable and rain seldom far away. In winter the valley was a cold, lonely place, the grass frozen brown and yellow, and clouds scudding across the mountain tops, the summit of Snowdon barely visible. But it held a strange beauty of its own . . .5

  * * *

  Rutherford’s fondness for Oliphant might have found its genesis in the commonality of their pedigrees, but it grew readily from there into a meeting of the minds. While other Rutherford acolytes including Moseley, Bohr, Chadwick and Kapitza forged strong personal and professional ties with their leader, the bond he shared with Oliphant trumped them on several levels. While the pair’s shared passion for pragmatic science made them kindred spirits within the laboratory, their abiding love of nature born from boyhoods spent outdoors elevated their relationship to another plane.

  At the Cavendish, however, they were just two men revelling in their shared fascination for particles.

  As a gifted experimentalist, but a physicist with a few self-confessed gaps in knowledge, Oliphant saw that the surest path to success in such a talented pool was to model himself, as much as practicable, on the world’s foremost experimental scientist – who, as convenience would have it, was also his supervising professor and personal friend.

  Rutherford’s inspiration, before coming under J.J. Thomson’s influence when he first arrived at the Cavendish, had been the British chemist and physicist Michael Faraday. Whether Rutherford also saw himself in Faraday’s back story – apprenticed to a London bookbinder at age fourteen, Faraday was self-taught and was unsuccessful in his early attempts to secure work at the Royal Institution’s laboratories – is unclear. However, Rutherford was a voracious reader of history and biography, and became a keen student of Faraday’s diaries. These were not mere jottings on daily experiences by the man regarded as science’s most gifted benchtop practitioner before Rutherford, but rather detailed experimental notes.

  What Rutherford gleaned from Faraday, who died four years before the New Zealander’s birth, Oliphant sought from Rutherford. ‘Faraday’s work laid the foundations of electrical engineering,’ Oliphant would explain in his 1946 Rutherford Lecture to Britain’s Physical Society. ‘Rutherford’s is the cornerstone upon which is based the exploitation of atomic energy.’6 Faraday’s rise from a poor family and rudimentary school education to establish himself as perhaps the greatest experimental scientist the world has known was both comforting and compelling to Oliphant too, given his own circumstances.

  As Rutherford saw it, the basis of Faraday’s genius lay in the simplicity of his methods. That was therefore the fundamental trait that Rutherford came to demand of his own work, and that of his students. In correspondence with acclaimed Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka in 1911, Rutherford had set down the philosophy that he would extol at the Cavendish: ‘I have always been a strong believer in attacking scientific problems in the simplest possible way, for I think that a large amount of time is wasted in building up complicated apparatus when a little forethought might have saved much time and much expense.’7

  In a presentation he delivered years later, Rutherford further distilled that sentiment: ‘If you can’t explain to the charwoman scrubbing your laboratory floor what you are doing, you don’t know what you are doing.’8

  ‘Rutherford did not expect spectacular results, though his deep pleasure was evident when they came, but he did expect devotion to research,’ Oliphant found as he developed a deeper understanding of his mentor. ‘What is more, he was confident that knowledge of nature was as yet elementary, and that research into any of the phenomena of nature could be rewarding. He often likened science to Tom Tiddler’s ground [a children’s game], for wherever one dug with intelligence and energy, no matter how many times it had been dug over before, something interesting was bound to turn up.’9

  Rutherford was known to evaluate a scholar’s worth solely on their experimental output, and he found little use in people who were not productively working. On one afternoon, as he chaperoned his young grandson around the Cavendish, the boy pointed at a research student hunched over equipment and asked of Rutherford, with a child’s innocence, ‘What’s that man doing, Grandad?’ Rutherford peered into the lab’s semi-darkness to study the figure before eventually replying, ‘I don’t know my boy – I’ve often wondered myself.’10

  There were some within the Cavendish, notably those of British heritage, who suspected their director’s faith in research students like Oliphant who hailed from elsewhere in the Commonwealth – a cohort that, at times, accounted for a third of the laboratory’s number – represented something of a blind spot. Rutherford’s rationale, however, was that he simply wanted people whose talent for the subject matter was only exceeded by their capacity to get things done. That a high proportion of such researchers came from the Dominions, where opportunity rarely arrived upon a pewter platter, was, to him, happy coincidence.

  In addition to the professional and practical guidance he took from Rutherford, Oliphant found in his teacher characteristics shared with his adored father, Baron. Among them were a heartfelt interest in people and a willingness to hear their stories regardless of rank or reputation. Rutherford had an appreciation of basic human decency that Oliphant greatly prized. At the end of any of his public discourses, Rutherford would personally thank every technician who had helped out with experimental equipment or visual aids.

  ‘He loved to tell anyone who would listen about his own work and interests, but he was as ready to discuss cosmology with Eddington as rabbits with his gardener at his country cottage; to listen avidly to the story of the conquest of the tsetse fly in Africa, or to argue holism with Field-Marshal Smuts,’ Oliphant later observed.11

  Like Baron Oliphant, Rutherford was also known as something of a soft touch for charitable causes he felt were credible and worthwhile. His harshly pragmatic wife would often intervene to prevent him from volunteering for events he had neither time nor stamina to attend. During 1925, in his role as president of the prestigious Royal Society, Rutherford had been engaged to deliver twenty speeches throughout Britain, in addition to the six-month lecture tour that took him to Australia and New Zealand. He had turned down a further sixty requests to address crowds in his adopted homeland that year.

  The fact that he had become only the second New Zealander (after ornithologist Walter Buller) to be confirmed as a Fellow of the Royal Society was a source of great scientific pride in his homeland. It was an achievement subsequently eclipsed, however, when the Society’s Fellows elected Rutherford as the 44th man – and first Antipodean – in more than 260 years to be installed as president for a term strictly mandated at five years. By doing so, Rutherford joined an illustrious lineage of former office-holders who included architect and astronomer Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Isaac Newton, botanist Sir Joseph Banks and Sir Joseph John (J.J.) Thomson. Far from a mere honorary title, the presidency added considerably to his already frenetic workload.

  Where he could employ his profile for social good, however, Rutherford regularly found time to engage in a little activism. When the stampede of male students back to the uni
versities after the Great War brought suggestions from campus administrators that the pressure be eased by refusing admission to women, Rutherford co-signed a letter of opposition sent to The Times, along with Cambridge’s chemistry professor, William Pope. They asserted: ‘We welcome the presence of women in our laboratories on the ground that residence in this University is intended to fit the rising generation to take its proper place in the outside world, where . . . in the present stage of the world’s affairs, we can afford less than ever before to neglect the training and cultivation of all the young intelligence available.’12

  The role Rutherford played in helping to restock Belgian libraries destroyed in the war of 1914 to 1918, and also the financial aid he mustered to re-establish Vienna’s Radium Institute when it remained blacklisted as an ‘enemy institution’ post-war, were never forgotten among the Continent’s science community. If Mark Oliphant’s fondness for tackling public causes had not been sufficiently cultivated by his ‘do-gooder’ family, then the exemplar he found in Rutherford was just as powerful.

  ‘[Rutherford] subscribed wholeheartedly to an opinion expressed by Bertrand Russell, that the world would be an infinitely pleasanter place if men would but learn to seek their own happiness, rather than the misery of others,’ Oliphant later wrote, citing another Trinity College figure, one with whom he would later build a close rapport.13

  Rutherford also liked to poke fun at what he saw as Oliphant’s ‘Shavian ideas’ – reflecting those of playwright George Bernard Shaw, often at odds with the wider community’s – as well as his habit of reading the New Statesman. It was this magazine, founded by the socialist Fabian Society, that had helped form Baron Oliphant’s political views, and which the socially conservative Rutherford jokingly characterised in Mark Oliphant’s presence as ‘dangerously subversive’.