Kiwi science legend 'sexist thug'

By CATHERINE MASTERS and GREGG WYCHERLEY

New Zealand hero and international science legend Lord Ernest Rutherford was a "thug" towards women and cruel in class to the only female student, says a book.

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation - which sold out at Whitcoulls in Auckland - briefly charts the personalities of many of the world's top scientists of the day and gives an unflattering account of Rutherford's treatment of women generally, and in particular of Cambridge University student Cecelia Payne, who became one of Britain's early women astronomers.

The account contradicts the picture usually presented of Rutherford as a champion of women and, especially, a supporter of female suffrage.

Author David Bodanis, a former academic at St Antony's College, Oxford, alleges that Rutherford, a "great booming bear of a man" was "bluff" and friendly with men but with women he was "bluff and pretty much a thug."

"He was cruel to her [Payne] at lectures, trying to get all the male students to laugh at this one female in their midst.

"It didn't stop her from going - she could hold her own with his best students in tutorials - but even 40 years later, retired from her professorship at Harvard, she remembered the rows of braying young men, nervously trying to do what their teacher expected of them."

But the claims are nonsense, says Canterbury University physicist John Campbell, author of Rutherford, Scientist Supreme.

He says Rutherford, who grew up near Nelson, was in fact a champion of women who married the daughter of a suffragette, campaigned to get equal rights for women at Cambridge University and even wrote to the Times of London saying women should have their own university.

"We cannot afford to retain the women seen but not recognised in this university nor to leave them at the mercy of another university which is not yet planned," he wrote.

Dr Campbell was "bloody outraged" that a populist author could malign such a champion of women.

He said Bodanis seemingly based his claim solely on Payne's biography. She had felt offended because Rutherford began his lectures each day with "Ladies and gentlemen."

Payne wrote: "All the boys regularly greeted this witticism with thunderous applause, stamping their feet in the traditional manner, and at every lecture I wished I could sink into the earth."

Bodanis, speaking from London, was upset to think he might have maligned a New Zealand hero.

But he stood by his book, saying Rutherford's behaviour was typical of men of the time. "I wouldn't want to single out Rutherford as worse than the others."

Bodanis did not know that Rutherford had married the daughter of a prominent suffragette.