The two Ernests—II

OCT 01, 1966

Sir Mark continues his personal recollections of Ernest Rutherford and Ernest Lawrence. By 1935 precise mass determinations with nuclear reactions were being made at Cavendish. In the following years Rutherford was arranging for new facilities at the laboratory. Meanwhile Lawrence began to use the cyclotron for medical research, learned to extract a beam from the accelerator and found a lot of unexpected radiation. Two years after Rutherford’s death, the discovery of fission opened a new era.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3047765

Mark L. Oliphant

BOTH ERNEST RUTHERFORD and Ernest Lawrence led great laboratories and inspired the physicists who worked in them. Rutherford was personally involved in almost all of the work at the Cavendish Laboratory, dominating the laboratory by his sheer greatness as a physicist and providing for his colleagues only the barest minimum of equipment. Lawrence, on the other hand, created at the Radiation Laboratory, the first of the very large laboratories in which massive and expensive equipment was designed, built and used for investigations into basic problems in physics in which he played little part, personally. After the discovery and successful development of the cyclotron at his laboratory, Lawrence enthusiastically offered his assistance in the construction of cyclotrons at laboratories elsewhere.

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References

1. J. Chadwick, Ithaca 26 VIII, 2 IX (1962).

More about the authors

Mark L. Oliphant, Australian National University, Canberra.