The Basis of Everything

by Andrew Ramsey

  Rutherford found himself torn. The Cavendish, too, had undergone some significant personnel upheavals, and Rutherford knew his own time at the helm was ticking away. So he was initially hesitant to provide Moss with a recommendation for fear of another poaching raid, but eventually suggested he might seek out and speak with Oliphant.

  Moss duly found his man and made his pitch, which included a list of reasons why Oliphant should consider quitting the bosom of nuclear research for the outer orbit of Birmingham, where facilities were even less extravagant, and there existed no formal differentiation between the disciplines of science and engineering.

  Oliphant, up to his neck in plans for the new laboratory, politely heard Moss out. Then he looked around at the construction barely under way and saw reflected back an unrecognisable vision of a future Cavendish, without Rutherford’s guidance. Facing a dilemma both personal and professional, he accepted Moss’s offer to visit Birmingham and judge for himself the potential that had been outlined. Then he bade his visitor farewell and set off for Rutherford’s office.

  Oliphant was uncertain of how the professor might react to hearing of his interest in the position, but at the same time he did not seek out his mentor with trepidation. It had been Rutherford, after all, who had sent Moss his way – in much the same manner as Cox and Peterson had sought out Rutherford for the more distant posting in Montreal, when he was seven years younger than Oliphant’s thirty-four. Indeed, Oliphant expected a similar response to that received by Nevill Mott – a future Cavendish professor – when he had asked Rutherford in 1932 if it would be prudent to accept the post of theoretical physics chair at Bristol University.

  ‘Look at me,’ Rutherford had enthused. ‘I went to McGill and Manchester, and came back. Of course you should go!’20

  Consequently, Rutherford’s reaction left the affable Australian full of fear that their relationship, much like that of father and son, was suddenly shattered, with the force and fury of a high-speed proton on a light-metal nucleus.

  ‘Do you mean you took seriously what Moss had to say?’ Rutherford stammered, unable to conceal his sense of betrayal.

  When Oliphant, taken aback, confirmed that he had, Rutherford’s bluster was replaced by hurt. ‘Wouldn’t you rather stay here and work with me and the others?’

  ‘Well, I’d like a show of my own. I think I’d like a show of my own,’ Oliphant countered, like a naughty child pleading mitigation to escape a thrashing.

  Rutherford’s wounded disbelief then escalated into abject rage.

  ‘Well, go . . . and be damned to you,’ he roared, leaving his friend, his protégé, his assistant director of research with no option but to rise slowly from his chair and make, crestfallen, for the door.21

  ‘He was very angry,’ Oliphant would recall. ‘Really, really nasty to me.’

  But, as with so many previous outbursts, the fury soon passed, to Oliphant’s great relief. ‘The next day, I had a letter from him, saying he was sorry that he’d lost his temper. Wishing me all luck in what I was intending to do, and said he’d love to talk over with me . . . the sort of program I had in mind and so on, offering me every assistance.’22

  The relationship had thus been quickly and fully restored, and Oliphant was left to wrestle with the offer that had come, draped in flattery, from Moss. He had not previously considered leaving Cambridge and the Cavendish. But largely due to the persuasive tone of Moss’s pitch, he began to ponder the benefits of taking up a physics chair when aged in his mid-thirties, for the sake of his own scientific development as well as the financial security of his family.

  In April 1936, Oliphant visited Birmingham University and took the opportunity to lay out the conditions under which he might consider accepting Moss’s offer. Not only did those include a five-fold increase in the department’s clearly inadequate research budget, but also a delay in taking up the appointment until the high-tension laboratory at Cambridge had been completed. That would mean any move would not occur until the latter half of 1937, allowing for a lengthy handover to further placate Rutherford.

  But even when Moss agreed to those terms, Oliphant remained unsure as to the wisdom of severing his connection to the Cavendish. Ultimately, it was the calm counsel of James Chadwick, who had made a similar decision the previous year, that convinced him to take the plunge. ‘Birmingham ought to have a real physics laboratory and it would be a great pity if they could not get the best man available,’ Chadwick wrote from Liverpool on 17 April 1936. ‘I think that means you, and most people would agree. The salary is higher than usual (and this counts in the pension too) and the conditions as far as I know are as good as anyone can expect. Such chances do not occur often.’23

  Having reached the wrenching decision and communicated it to Rutherford, who accepted it with little outward rancour, his appointment was confirmed in June 1936, with a proposed starting date at Birmingham of October the following year. In the intervening period, there was much to celebrate during Oliphant’s final phase at Cambridge. In May 1937, he learned of his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, an honour considered second only to a Nobel Prize among British scientists. It was recognition that had been championed on his behalf by Rutherford, in his role as the revered organisation’s immediate past president.

  Later that year, the new high-tension laboratory was completed. With its one- and two-million-volt generators and towering roofline to encase the equipment’s tall steel towers topped by bulbous spheres, the building dwarfed the Cavendish’s other research spaces in both scale and investment. As Otto Frisch later recounted, the huge machines ‘were well beloved by journalists and TV producers, being their idea of the shape of science to come, with their tall columns of polished metal electrodes and the crashing sparks they could be provoked to generate’.24

  With experimental work underway using the new high-voltage equipment, Oliphant felt less anxiety, though enduring wistfulness, about his impending role at Birmingham. He was buoyed, however, by the prospect of taking charge of his own research program and facilities. And he gained reassurance from the knowledge that Rutherford remained at the Cavendish’s helm, assisted by such gifted lieutenants as John Cockcroft and Philip Dee.

  In October 1937, soon after he had started his tenure as Poynting Chair at Birmingham, Oliphant joined Cockcroft and Niels Bohr at a symposium in Bologna to mark the 200th anniversary of Italian physicist Luigi Galvani’s birth.

  It was there, in an eerie reprise of his helpless experience in Belgium when his son fell fatally ill, that Mark Oliphant’s blossoming world was again plunged into gloom. A telegram sent by Philip Dee at the Cavendish alerted delegates to the unthinkable, and informed Oliphant of the unbearable. Ernest Rutherford – that force of nature, that seemingly unstoppable power, as irresistible and constant as the nuclear forces he had laid bare – was dead. At age sixty-six.

  14

  ‘REQUIEM AETERNAM’

  Cambridge, 1937

  Rutherford had spent September 1937 at Chantry Cottage. Oliphant was with him for some of that time, during which his defection to Birmingham was rarely raised. Rutherford was, instead, buoyant about his first visit to India, where he would preside in the new year over a joint sitting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Indian Science Congress in Calcutta. He devoted much of September to preparing his welcome address, ahead of his planned departure on the lengthy sea voyage before Christmas.

  While commitment to his presentation allowed Rutherford to escape the bulk of Mary’s gardening demands, when he returned to Cambridge in early October, colleagues noticed his usually gregarious manner had dulled. Convinced he was merely suffering the effects of manual labour, Rutherford called upon Arthur Waller, the Victoria Avenue butcher who doubled as a backroom masseur and who, for some time, had treated the professor’s troublesome knee, a painful reminder of his very first days in England.

  Even for a man more trained in assessing pork bellies, it took only a cursory ex
amination for Waller to recognise that his patient’s ills required medical expertise. After swallowing castor oil, the household cure-all, Rutherford took to bed but spent the night vomiting. The family doctor was summoned next morning.

  The problem was diagnosed as a strangulated hernia; a section of gut had protruded between Rutherford’s abdominal muscles and caused an intestinal obstruction. It was an oft-seen condition, particularly in men who were known to undertake bouts of vigorous manual labour, such as wielding a crosscut saw, or as a result of sustained coughing fits, usually among heavy smokers.

  For a typical patient, such a condition required urgent but not intricate surgery. Mary’s wayward cousin and former housekeeper, Bay de Renzie, had undergone the procedure and suffered no complications. But for Baron Rutherford of Nelson, Britain’s premier science peer, the case immediately became mired in the protocols of prestige.

  No surgeon in Cambridge seemed willing to risk operating upon such a lauded public figure, lest the unthinkable happen and the patient be lost. Rather, the local medical fraternity opted to enlist the expertise of their more celebrated colleagues in London and further afield, several hours’ train travel away.

  It was the delay more than the complexity of Rutherford’s condition that would prove catastrophic. For all the humility he routinely displayed, he would ultimately fall victim to his fame.

  A second opinion was sought from John Ryle, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, 135 kilometres away, who then confirmed the initial diagnosis. Rutherford was admitted to Cambridge’s Evelyn private hospital, but could not be operated upon until a suitably titled surgeon was summoned by Ryle from London’s Harley Street.

  Sir Thomas Dunhill – who, as Mary noted in updates to family, had recently treated the Princess Royal (Princess Mary) for a thyroid condition – arrived by train that Friday evening. Within two hours – but the best part of a day after the problem was identified – the Australian-born surgeon operated.

  The surgery had narrowly avoided the onset of gangrene in Rutherford’s gut, and Mary’s early reports on his recovery were so promising that Oliphant and Cockcroft led the Cavendish delegation to Bologna in full expectation that the professor would be grumpily recuperating upon their return. But by Sunday, he began to vomit uncontrollably, and the intestinal paralysis doctors had hoped would resolve itself now appeared irreversible. A tube was inserted down Rutherford’s throat to drain stomach fluids, and injections given in an effort to stimulate the inactive tract, but his condition worsened.

  Come Monday, Dunhill was again dispatched to Cambridge to adjudicate on whether further surgery was required. Following a half-hour consultation, he advised Mary – who had maintained a constant bedside vigil, during which she wrote heartfelt letters of hope to her nearest, including Oliphant – that nothing more could be done. Rutherford was being kept alive by saline administered intravenously, but it was deemed too risky to proceed with another operation, as he was unlikely to survive the anaesthetic or any further disturbance to his intestine, given his fragile state.

  Mary refused to abandon hope, however, and late that evening wrote to Oliphant: ‘He is a wonderful patient and bears his discomforts splendidly, so tired and weary of these interminable days. There is just a thread of hope! Love to Rosie. Yours affectionately, Mary Rutherford.’1

  The letter she began to Ernest’s sister Florence (Floss) in New Zealand later that night bore greater poignancy.

  He drops out a surprisingly keen remark now and then. I could hardly bear it last night when he began to say he was sorry he was impatient sometimes, but he had really always depended on my decision of mind etc. He has enormous numbers of friends who love him, they all knew he never worked in any way for himself, always for others and he has helped all kinds of people.

  The doctor is here now and . . . says he is downhill a little since 8am. Ernest has just told the matron that he feels a good deal better poor darling. His patience is wonderful with all these horrible tubes hanging from his mouth and his arm and he feels the heat of being well covered up and yet they dare not risk any chill.2

  The letter remained unfinished. Further improvement never came.

  In the final hours of his towering life, as well as voicing his regret that his adored wife must continue alone, Ernest Rutherford instructed her to bequeath £100 from his modest estate to Nelson College, the school that had ignited his intellect and spared him a future on a New Zealand farm.

  In the early evening of Tuesday, 19 October 1937, Ernest Rutherford died with his wife at his bedside.

  * * *

  In Bologna, Cockcroft received Philip Dee’s grim cable early the next day. The conference reconvened as Oliphant and many of his brethren made plans to return to England at the first opportunity.

  Niels Bohr unsuccessfully fought tears as he told stunned delegates of overnight events. Oliphant later described Bohr’s impromptu address that morning as the most unforgettably moving public tribute he would witness, and lamented that the paraphrased version published in Nature two weeks later captured little of its raw sincerity or heart-rending sorrow.

  With the passing of Lord Rutherford, the life of one of the greatest men who ever worked in science has come to an end. His achievements are indeed so great that, at a gathering of physicists like the one here assembled in honour of Galvani, where recent progress in our science is discussed, they provide the background of almost every word that is spoken. Rutherford passed away at the height of his activity, which is the fate his best friends would have wished for him, but . . . he will be missed more, perhaps, than any scientific worker has ever been missed before.3

  Following his faltering eulogy, Bohr joined Oliphant and Cockcroft on a dash to Cambridge, their journey spent swapping treasured memories that were punctuated by lengthy reflective silences.

  Back in Cambridge, pained by the guilt of once again being distantly absent when a loved one died, Oliphant insisted on bidding Rutherford a final goodbye. Accompanied by Dee, he went to the hospital morgue, ‘where the body lay, pale and still . . . we agreed that all that made Rutherford for us had gone and only a shell remained. I was greatly distressed by this experience.’4 Oliphant was never able to erase that upset, revisiting the sadness of his post-mortem visit thirty years later, when he confided to Dee that it had coldly clarified ‘our realisation that the pallid shell was not the man we loved’.5

  Rutherford’s funeral began at noon the following Monday, a calmingly clear if slightly chill London autumn afternoon. If not for the majestic backdrop of Westminster Abbey, it might have passed as the sort of unaffected occasion that captured the man’s essence. As the Nature eulogy recounted: ‘There was no pomp or pageantry as is seen at the burial of our great naval and military leaders, no word was said of his life or achievements, but a quiet air of sincerity pervaded the whole scene and left an indelible impression that it was all as he would have wished.’6

  Attending the coffin that contained the late physicist’s ashes were Rutherford’s long-time friend, Royal Society President Sir William Bragg, and his colleague and later biographer, Arthur Eve. Mary was assisted by Bohr and Oliphant throughout the short, simple service, which was attended by all from the Cavendish Laboratory, as befitting a family bereavement. The memorial was closed by a lone organist playing Basil Harwood’s ‘Requiem Aeternam’.

  At the music’s completion, Rutherford’s ashes were laid to rest in the nave. Alongside the monument to Sir Isaac Newton. Near the grave of Sir Charles Darwin, and plaques honouring Lord Kelvin, James Clerk Maxwell and the late professor’s inspiration, Michael Faraday.

  Rutherford joined that pantheon of science immortals as the first man born in Britain’s distant dominions to be granted eternal sanctuary within the abbey’s holy confines.

  * * *

  The tributes were as profound as they were plentiful. Max Born, whose family Ernest and Mary had regularly reunited with their pet dog while it was quarantined, was a personal friend of
Einstein yet rated Rutherford the greatest scientist he had known. Physicist turned novelist C.P. Snow, who had worked with Rutherford, rated him as ‘very likely the major scientific figure since Newton . . . It is to this man we owe the entire atomic age. And the Cavendish was the greatest physics laboratory in the world.’7

  Oliphant believed his mentor’s contributions exceeded those of Faraday and Einstein because of the influence he wielded upon a generation of students and researchers whose work, in turn, changed the world. From Frederick Soddy (1921) and Bohr (1922) through to Kapitza (1978), a dozen Rutherford disciples would earn Nobel Prizes. Six of those were awarded to Cavendish staff when Rutherford was at the helm, during which time he brought together researchers from countries as disparate as Australia and Japan, South Africa and Russia. In recognition of his breadth of achievement – from proving the earth’s age to demystifying the nature of matter – he received more than 30 honorary degrees, appeared on stamps in at least four countries and eventually had an element, rutherfordium, named in his honour.

  The memories that Oliphant cherished could not be quantified or catalogued. In the aftermath of the funeral, seeking solace in his new surrounds at Birmingham while quietly yearning for the comforting embrace of the not so distant Cavendish days, he would reflect on the times when Rutherford made an evening return by train to Cambridge after committee meetings or speaking engagements in London. Oliphant would collect him from the town’s remote railway station, then drive him home to Newnham Cottage. It was often during these brief trips, after Rutherford had spent an hour or more collating his thoughts on the train, that the professor revealed most of himself.

  On one occasion, having chaired a meeting of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research’s advisory council, Rutherford was noticeably introspective.

  When I asked whether the day had gone well, he said that he was worried because members of the Council had again attacked him for not relating the work of the Cavendish more closely to the industrial needs of the nation. Moreover, he had been accused of producing research workers who were of little or no use when faced with ‘real’ problems. [But] his spirits soon recovered.