INSIDE MATTER: RUTHERFORD AND THE ATOMIC REVOLUTION

Nobody has ever seen the inside of an atom, and nobody ever will. Everything we claim to know about it was established by throwing something at it and watching what came back. Ernest Rutherford, the son of a New Zealand flax farmer, turned that awkward fact into the most productive method in the history of science. He named the alpha and the beta ray, wrote the first physical law that says nothing at all about any individual event, transmuted one element into another, found the nucleus in a deflection that should not have happened, predicted the neutron twelve years before anyone found it, and built two laboratories that between them produced a dozen Nobel laureates and most of twentieth-century physics. He also published an atom that could not exist, and said so in print. He calculated that his own model gave the electron less than a billionth of a second before it spiralled into the core, declared the question outside the scope of the evidence, and left it open for someone else. Two years later Niels Bohr closed it by simply asserting what the evidence could not supply. This book argues that the pair of them, taken together, show something about how physics actually works that neither shows alone. And in 1933 Rutherford said that anyone expecting a source of power from the transformation of the atom was talking moonshine. He was right about everything he had measured and blind to everything he had not, which is the characteristic failure of a mind disciplined enough to refuse to guess. Inside Matter follows the experiment rather than the man. It runs from a wooden box in Manchester through Chadwick, Cockcroft and Walton, the Stanford accelerator that found hard points inside the proton, and on to the one object the method cannot dislodge: the quark that will not come out. There the book asks a question Rutherford would have recognised, since he asked its ancestor in 1911 and refused to answer it - what do you say about the inside of something when the only tool you have has finally run out? >KEYWORDS Rutherford, nucleus, scattering, radioactivity, transmutation, confinement, isotopology