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Atom
Piers Bizony

2017 Icon Books (First published in 2007)
ISBN 976-1-78578-205-3
206 pages. Soft Cover.
21 b/w photos and 4 b/w line drawings.

Purchasing Details.
Amazon

My Comments on This Book
Rutherford appears on various pages including 27-36, 59-60, 78-91, 104. Unfortunately, the errors involving Rutherford makes one wonder about the accuracy of the work as a whole.

Errors Noted.
p 27 The University of New Zealand was the examining body for the then 3 constituent universities or colleges at Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin. Wellington is the capital. Rutherford attended Canterbury College in Christchurch where he graduated with 3 degrees, B.A., M.A. (with honours in both Mathematics and physics), B.Sc. (in Chemistry and Geology.)
p 28 Rutherford didn't start working on X-rays with JJ Thomson. Their discovering wasn't announced until Rutherford had been at the Cavendish for 3 months. He first worked on two other projects of his own (dielectric properties and wireless signalling at very high frequencies) before joining to assist Thomson's work on how a good electrical insulator (a gas) could become a good electrical conductor (a gas discharge).
p 29 Alpha particles were called undeviable rays until Rutherford's careful experiments at McGill showed they could be.
p 29 Rutherford went to McGill because interviewers arrived at the Cavendish, the source of past professors, when Rutherford knew that as a non-Cambridge graduate he couldn't receive a college fellowship at Cambridge for another two years.
p 29 At McGill Rutherford initially used Thorium compounds as his radioactive soures. This was a waste product of mantles needed for gas lamps. p 29 At McGill Rutherford was well on the way to understanding natural transmutation before he invited Soddy to join him in the chemical side.
p 30 Rutherford first dated the age of minerals and the Earth by the amount of helium gas occluded in a mineral.
p 32 It was Rutherford and Royds, not Geiger, who demonstrated that alpha particles were ionized helium atoms.
p 33 Geiger did not invent the Rutherford-Geiger tube. (See my book p325-327.)
p 34 The story of Rutherford's alpha scattering experiment is garbled. Marsden did the work under Geiger's laboratory direction and they published the results.
p 86 Rutherford had wanted an accelerator for years, but knew industry could only produce dc voltages a fraction of that of natural alpha particles. Following Gamow's talk on particles tunnelling into a nucleus, Cockcroft calculated that under Gamow's theory, the flux of incident particles would be far higher than available from available radioactive sources. Gamow deserves much of the credit.

Contents
List of Illustrations

vii

Foreword by Jim Al-Khalili

ix

Acknowledgements

xiii

Preface

xv

Part 1 Energy in Pieces

1

Part 2 The Empty Atom

27

Part 3 Not Even Wrong

41

Part 4 Playing with Marbles

77

Part 5 Blast Radius

99

Part 6 Renormalising the Infinities

129

Part 7 Three Quarks fo Muster Mark!

157

Activities

109

Part 8 Ylem

167

Part 9 New Frontiers

179

Further Reading

195

Index

197

Reviews
Not known at this stage.

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