Sir Ernest Rutherford during a visit home to New Zealand in 1926. Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library
He helped shape modern technology and is considered one of New Zealand’s greatest scientists.
But Ernest Rutherford is so much more than the man who split the atom and appears on the Kiwi $100 bill.
Napier-born and bred historian Matthew Wright is the author of Ernest Rutherford and the Birth of Modern Physics, a new book revealing the science that propelled Rutherford to a Nobel prize, and led to Albert Einstein calling him a second Isaac Newton.
Wright was compelled to write the book to explain Rutherford’s science and story, as there’s been “an awful lot of misinformation”.
“When I say misinformation, it’s simply that it understates what he did,” Wright said.
“He’s viewed as the guy that split the atom, or the guy that discovered radioactivity, or discovered the reason of radioactivity to be more accurate.
“But there was so much more to him than that and he was so much greater than the mythology suggests.”
Some modern technologies that utilise Rutherford’s discoveries include smoke detectors, wifi, sonograms, induction stove tops, and many more modern necessities and nice-to-haves.
Growing up in a middle-class home in Nelson, Rutherford had a good childhood and could have easily gone off to become a school teacher, Wright said, but he wanted much more.
“He was relentlessly curious and went out and got ahead in ways that other people weren’t, and he kept that attitude – the go-getter, laser focused on discovery,” he said.
“What Rutherford is to me is the idea that people with enthusiasm, people with drive, and people with focus can do all sort of things.”
Wright points out the man from Nelson, and then later Taranaki, catapulted himself to the very top of the physics field in very short order as a 25-year-old and then proceeded to do things that the full scope of what he did isn’t fully recognised – even today.
“I think by any measure, [he is] one of the greatest New Zealanders that ever lived because of that fundamental role that he played, changing the basis of chemistry, changing the way science understood chemistry, changing and creating the understanding that you have an atomic structure with a nucleus,” he said.
“These were the key things that he did, and they were absolutely transformational.”
Among the many groundbreaking scientific discoveries Rutherford contributed to include the discovery of the atomic nucleus in 1911, showing that the structure of the atom by nature had to have a nucleus in it, and that the nucleus had to carry a very small charge.
“All these things were absolutely radical at the time, and it totally changed the basis on which everything then worked, as far as chemists were concerned,” Wright said.
The other thing Rutherford helped implement in the world of science was leading research teams.
“We’re looking here at the time when research and the sciences were making the transition from individual academics doing particular things to the teamwork that we have today,” Wright said.
“Rutherford’s main place in the world of science was leading these teams.”
To research the book, Wright accessed Rutherford’s original notebooks and scientific papers from the Cambridge University Library in the United Kingdom, where Rutherford worked as a research student in 1895 before becoming a professor and director at the university’s Cavendish Laboratory.
There, Wright accessed letters sent to Rutherford from French radioactivity pioneer Marie Curie.
“Rutherford and Marie Curie were somewhat in competition, but they also were very good friends and colleagues ... and wrote professionally to each other quite often,” Wright said.
“Some of those letters ... are a radiation hazard, and they are still radioactive, so it was quite an adventure accessing those.
“I did the maths for it, and I worked out that they’re still 95% as radioactive today as when Curie sent them through ordinary post to Rutherford.”
Curie’s exposure to radiation ultimately led to her death.
Rutherford avoided a similar fate, dying from a strangulated hernia at 66 in 1937.
Wright believes Rutherford’s story is one every Kiwi should know well.
“One of the key messages of the book, and one that I think is a useful message anyway, is it’s a story of hope, and it’s a story of attitude,” Wright said.
“It’s a challenging world out there at the minute, and his story demonstrates that New Zealanders absolutely have it in them to do that at a global level and that’s true for now and the future, as much as it was for history.”
Ernest Rutherford and the Birth of Modern Physics by Matthew Wright is available now in bookstores and online from Oratia Books for $45.
Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke’s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in the UK, Germany, and New Zealand.