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DVD/Books

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Comments
Errors Noted
Contents
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Ernest Rutherford
J G Crowther

1972 Methuen's Brief Lives
SBN 423-46760-3
46 pages. Soft Cover.
13 b/w photos and 2 b/w illustrations.

Purchasing Details.
Out of Print

My Comments on This Book
   A good little book of its day although it has the usual errors by authors who use secondary sources as their reference material. Rutherford didn't do radio work in New Zealand. Some of his later science is also mixed up.

Errors Noted.
p 7 The Maoris, who first discovered New Zealand around 1340, will get a surprise to learn that New Zealand was first discovered by Able Tasman in 1642.
p 8 The Rutherford family didn't arrive in New Zealand on the Phoebe Dunbar. They arrived on the Phoebe which later sunk on the coast of India so the owner, Duncan Dunbar, named his replacement ship, the Phoebe Dunbar, honouring his wife yet again.
p 8 "its voyage took more than six months." No. The Phoebe left London on the 16th of November 1942 and arrived at Nelson on 29th March 1843.
p 9 Martha was one of the first schoolteachers in New Zealand. One of the first female teachers would be more correct. And she took over after her mother remarried and became pregnant.
p 11 James didn't build a house at Foxhill. He purchased an existing large accommodation house that had previously been the coach house for the Nelson to West Coast run.
p 16 There weren't two Science Societies at Canterbury College, just the student one. The other was the Canterbury Philosophical Institute, which Rutherford joined in 1892, which had its rooms in the public library. In November 1894 he had his first paper taken as read, the results of his second year of research, as this was a requirement for publication in the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute.
p 17 The results of Rutherford's first year of research (1893) were published in his second publication of 1895.
p 19 May Newton enrolled at Canterbury College in 1894, four years after Ern.
p 24 Ernest naming of two rays (alpha and beta) were because one was easily stopped and the other more penetrating.

Contents
Ch1 The Atom

5

Ch 2 New Zealand and Radio

7

Ch 3 Cambridge and electricity in gases

19

Ch 4 Montreal and radioactivity

26

Ch 5 Manchester and the nucleus

29

Ch 6 Cavendish Professor

38

Reviews
   Not known at this stage.

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