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to infinity and beyond!
Jan. 31st, 2005 10:38 pmLatest new book read: The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart.
The fly is the atomic nucleus, and the book is the story of how it came about that two scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, were able to bombard lithium with a stream of protons in 1932 and thereby become the first to split the atom, and incidentally prove that e really does equal mc2. (They got their Nobels in 1951, due to the backlog for great physics discoveries in those days.)
Ignore the line in the dj flap blurb about the "nearly infinite" number of atoms in the universe. Nothing in the book itself is scientifically illiterate like that. This is in fact a superbly written story, mixing together warm and sympathetic portraits of personalities (of whom Ernest Rutherford is the leading figure, of course) and concrete descriptions of what days in the laboratory were like with clear, lucid accounts of what the heck they were actually trying to do in there.
Possibly the best history of science book I've ever read.
The fly is the atomic nucleus, and the book is the story of how it came about that two scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, were able to bombard lithium with a stream of protons in 1932 and thereby become the first to split the atom, and incidentally prove that e really does equal mc2. (They got their Nobels in 1951, due to the backlog for great physics discoveries in those days.)
Ignore the line in the dj flap blurb about the "nearly infinite" number of atoms in the universe. Nothing in the book itself is scientifically illiterate like that. This is in fact a superbly written story, mixing together warm and sympathetic portraits of personalities (of whom Ernest Rutherford is the leading figure, of course) and concrete descriptions of what days in the laboratory were like with clear, lucid accounts of what the heck they were actually trying to do in there.
Possibly the best history of science book I've ever read.
