The Rutherford Memorial Lecture, 1954 Rutherford-his life and work, 1871-1937

Abstract

It is a great pleasure to be with you to-day and I owe that good fortune to your acceptance of the suggestion by the Royal Society which controls a fund of £100 000 collected in the Commonwealth and dedicated to the memory of Lord Rutherford. This fund provides for post-graduate training and research of selected young men and women but its Committee is also charged with the duty of arranging for the delivery of annual lectures in the Commonwealth countries in turn and dealing with some aspect of Rutherford’s life or developments of the scientific work he inaugurated. It seemed to the Committee that the first few lectures should be given by one or other of those who were fortunate enough to work with Rutherford in the heyday of his powers. Previous lectures were given by Sir John Cockcroft in New Zealand in 1952 and by Sir James Chadwick in Canada in 1953. It would be interesting perhaps to speculate on the subject-matter of some future Rutherford memorial lecture in South Africa when the nature of the forces holding together the atomic nucleus has been unravelled and we have advanced one stage further in our understanding of these subuniverses. The lecture might deal, equally appropriately, not with the subuniverse but with the constitution and evolution of the stars themselves, since atomic transformations appear to be the basis of the constitution energy and radiations concerned, and Rutherford himself often speculated on this subject.