The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart, Viking/Penguin, £14.99, ISBN 0670883212
THIS is the story of the men who smashed apart the atom. The history books record the names of only John Cockroft (above, left) and Ernest Walton (above, right), but there was a third man: Ernest Rutherford (above, centre), arguably the greatest experimental physicist of the 20th century. Well into his 50s, and way past his most productive years, he gambled everything on Cockroft and Walton delivering him a final, spectacular discovery. He gambled – and he won.
Rutherford’s achievement is all the more remarkable in that he and his young protégés pulled it off in the face of fierce American competition from Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley, California, and Merle Tuve in Washington DC. Both were formidable experimentalists with vastly superior resources at their disposal. But then Rutherford was the man who could work miracles with sealing wax and screwdrivers. He had proved it over and over again, discovering the impossibly small “nucleus” at the heart of the atom – the fly in the cathedral – and even chipping bits off the nucleus using nature’s own subatomic projectiles.
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By 1930, however, the sealing-wax-and-screwdriver age was coming to an end. Rutherford may not have liked to admit it, but he knew it in his heart. Breaking into the nucleus would require projectiles faster than anything nature could provide. It would require artificially accelerated particles – an atom smasher – and it was this that Cockroft and Walton set about building at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.
Brian Cathcart follows the twists and turns of their struggle, as they battled with death-defying voltages and plasticine-sealed vacuum tubes, against a backdrop of the trials and tribulations of their personal lives. Not only did they have to outwit nature, but they had to do it in the face of great personal tragedy. Cockroft’s son died of an asthma-related condition, and a later child was stillborn.
Cathcart, a journalist, has written a compelling, multilayered account of Cockroft and Walton’s great struggle, all the more remarkable because he has no science background. (His previous book topics include election politics and the botched investigation of the racist murder of British teenager Stephen Lawrence.)
Everything builds up to the moment in 1932 when Cockroft and Walton turn on their proton “accelerator” and tiny flashes of light on a zinc sulphide screen reveal the impacts of helium nuclei, the unmistakeable debris of beryllium nuclei, cleaved in two. Cockroft and Walton had done what no one – apart from Rutherford – had believed they had a hope in hell of doing. They had split the atom.