Nelson Evening Mail FRIDAY, JANUARY 2, 1931 NELSON’S DISTINGUISHED SON

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 2 January 1931, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail FRIDAY, JANUARY 2, 1931 NELSON’S DISTINGUISHED SON

THE new honour conferred on Sir Ernest Rutherford will be acclaimed throughout the world. New Zealand is proud of her distinguished son. The Waimeas, his birthplace, and Nelson College, liis old school, have watched each step in his amazing career. Country boy of the ’eighties, leading sicentist of the world to-day, and probably his greatest work has yet to come. Sir Ernest Rutherford has been described as the man in British science to-day whose most startling pronouncements are immediately leceived with confidence throughout the scientific world. It has seemed, as a German scientist said of Faraday, that Sir Ernest Rutherford could smell the truth. His early researches were concerned with wireless waves, but it was not until he turned his attention to the subject of radio-activity that his triumphs began. At the very end of the past century the discovery of radium was attracting the notice of the scientific world, and Rurtherford promptly perceived the importance of the wonderful new substance which continually gave out energy without apparently suffering any change. He soon showed that the rays which are given out by radium and kindred substances are of three distinct kinds, and proved by a startling ,experiment that the so-called alpha rays shot out by radium are none other than atoms of the gas helium, then recently discovered by Sir William Ramsay. He also elaborated the theory that in radio-activity we have atoms actually breaking down into simpler atoms, as a consequence of the emission of rays, so that, for example, in two thousand years the costly radium is half-transformed into —lead ! This theory was utterly aL variance with everything previously accepted, yet it is now as firmly established as anything in science. A great deal of Sir Ernest Rutherford’s early work on radio-activity was carried out in Montreal, where he was appointed professor in 1898. He left in 1907 to take up the professorship at Atanchester University, and here students from all parts of the world—-Ame-rica, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Japan —flocked to nis laboratory. It was in Alamchester that he carried out the. experiments which led him to the theory of atomic structure which dominates the world of physics to-day. He proved that the atom, instead of being something very solid, must have a very open structure, and suggested that it must resemble a small planetary system, with a positively charged “sun’ in the middle and electrons, like tiny planets, circulating around it. Since then he has carried out a host of experiments bearing on the structure of the atom.

Sir Ernest Rutherford s fame is chiefly connected with the realm of the infinitely little, the structure and composition of the marvellously minute. But the discoveries which he has made in this field apply very definitely to that other half of the universe, the almost inconceivably great. For the atom and the world are of ilie same cosmic importance and the knowledge of the one is necessary to the understanding of the other. As has been said, Eir firmest has mounted the heights of knowledge on another plane of life than that of everyday affairs, and few there are who can follow and not many who can do more than watch the ascent. In the age of the race’s infancy there was only half an earth. It was fiat, generally speaking. But this fiat earth, encircled by the gulf without bottom, must surely rest on something, must have something to hold it up. A reasonable enough contention! And the physicists of that far day did not balk at the question. There was, they said, a very strong man underneath whose mighty sinews and ctrßd muscles had hitherto sufficed to the task, and, they hoped, would continue so to do. But the idea of this super-strong man was not accepted without question. To some thoughtful minds it seemed inadequate. They leaned to the opinion that the upholder was an elep.iant, masshe and strong, of course, s.fjvnd all known elephantine strength and massiveness. And what of the arching skies. Here primitive wisdom reached pretty unanimous conclusions. The heavens were solid and fitted over the earth like a bell-glass. Greece, with her wonderful speculative mind, began to offer new cosmic suggestions. Pythagoros, who lived in the sixth century B.C. taught that the earth was a sphere and that it completely revolved every twenty-four hours. Other philosophers, both of the Greek and Alexandrian schools, possessed with but the scantiest equipment of astronomical facts, reached conclusions which were in the circumstances remarkably close to modern discoveries. But reactiona-y forces prevailed, and the mass of the world went down into the night of the Middle Ages wedded to the belief that the earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all other heavenly bodies existed merely as vassals and attendants to it.

For more than a thousand years astronomical knowledge stood still; then, Nicholas Copernicus, brooding on the speculations of old Greek philosophers, rebelled against the flattering but cramping idea of the earth’s sovereignty and placed the sun as the centre of our system. Following Copernicus came Galelei who, with his primitive telescope, his optick tube as he called it, confirmed and extended his master’s speculations. But it was some danger thus to attempt to overturn the convictions of centuries : Galilei was imprisoned and compel-

led to recant ; Giordano Bruno, his contemporary, more nobly obstinate, was burned at the- stake. Yet knowledge will advance. Before many years the Copernican system had become a commonplace in all enlightened opinion. And from that time on there lias been no halt in the march of discovery. Marvellous enough were the facts of the solar system but they sank into insignificance when compared with the facts of the star-strewn spaces beyond. For the stars themselves were suns. The myriad twinkling points of light which earlier man had thought to be stuck in a crystal vault for his especial benefit turned out to be, many of them, inconceivably larger than the earth itself; the “little stars’’ had become majestic. suns. And their number transcended arithmetic. To look through the telescope at the midnight sky was to see a fog of worlds, and sun-maze stretching back and back till vision utterly failed.

A far cry from the flat earth and the over-arching sky-bowl! From that primitive conception the mind of man has leapt to sublimities, immensities, eternities. And yet. his knowledge is only in the bud. For in these latter centuries, - and more than ever in the last, has come a new motive into human mentality, a passion for discovery, a thirst for knowledge for its own sake.