Retorts

Atomic Assumptions

The entry on Rutherford in The History Today Companion to British History promulgates the tiresome "father of the A-bomb" image. This persistent smear is thoroughly misleading and unfair. As a New Zealand scientist and (retired) academic, I have published outlines of the facts in various New Zealand media, and discussed them with the last visiting Rutherford lecturer, Professor Sir Denys Wilkinson, a nuclear physicist, who is interested in this history.

Rutherford discovered (with Geiger and Marsden) the atomic nucleus, and demonstrated the first artificial transmutation -- a process which has acquired the vernacular label "splitting the atom" but is very different from fission of heavy nuclides. Nuclear fission was not discovered until the year after Rutherford's death. He inveighed against the general notion of any useful energy from the nucleus, vigorously characterising it as mere moonshine.

If the "Father of the A-Bomb" image were true, we Kiwi admirers of this century's greatest scientist would have to live with it; but it is false, so we should resent and correct it.

L. R.B. Mann, Auckland