Newsletter, November 2017
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ISSN 1756-168X (Print) ISSN 2516-3353 (Online) Newsletter No. 35 November 2017 Published by the History of Physics Group of the Institute of Physics (UK & Ireland) ISSN 1756-168X IOP History of Physics Newsletter November 2017 Contents Editorial 2 Meeting Reports Chairman’s Report 3 Rutherford’s chemists - abstracts 5 ‘60 Years on from ZETA’ by Chris Warrick 10 Letters to the editor 13 Obituary John W Warren by Stuart Leadstone 15 Features Anti-matter or anti-substance? by John W Warren 16 A Laboratory in the Clouds - Horace-Bénédict de Saussure by Peter Tyson 18 On Prof. W.H.Bragg’s December 1914 Letter to the Vice- Chancellor of the University of Leeds by Chris Hammond 34 Book Reviews Crystal Clear - Autobiographies of Sir Lawrence and Lady Bragg by Peter Ford 54 Forthcoming Meetings 69 Committee and contacts 70 61 2 Editorial A big ‘Thank you’! Around 45 people attended the Bristol meeting on the History of Particle Colliders, in April. It was a joint meeting between the History of Physics Group, the High Energy Physics Group, and the Particle Accelerators and Beams Group. With a joint membership of around 2000, that works out at well under 3% - and that was a good turnout. The Rutherford’s Chemists meeting held in Glasgow attracted probably a similar percentage - not very high you might think. But time and travel costs to attend come at a premium so any means by which the content of our meetings may be promulgated - reports in our newsletter and in those of the other groups - is a very worthwhile task. Better still, though, is the publication of the talks themselves - however, not only worthwhile but a considerable undertaking for the speakers concerned. I am very pleased, therefore, to say that the group will be publishing a special issue next month comprising some of the talks given at both these meetings. I am also very pleased to report that the meeting on the history of units held last year at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, is to be recollected in a book, ‘Precise Dimensions - a History of Units from 1791 to 2018’ published by the IOPP. It includes most of the talks given with the bonus of two other contributors writing on the mole and the candela. It seems very appropriate here, to extend my heartfelt thanks to all our contributors - from the largest articles to the smallest - all are the very lifeblood of this newsletter and indeed the group as a whole. Thank you! Malcolm Cooper IOP History of Physics Newsletter November 2017 3 Chairman’s Report Four meetings were scheduled for 2017; they have covered a wide range of areas of physics and have been co-hosted by a number of other organisations, both other groups of the IOP and those from further afield. The first, on the History of Particle Colliders, was organised by Vince Smith and held in Bristol in April; it was a joint meeting between the History of Physics Group, the High Energy Physics Group, and the Particle Accelerators and Beams Group, with further sponsorship from the School of Physics at the University of Bristol. It focussed on the historical and political aspects of the design, construction and operation of the machines. The first talk, by Giulia Pancheri of Frascati, discussed the work of the Austrian Bruno Touschek, who built a 15 MeV betatron with the Norwegian Rolf Widerøe during World War II, and was responsible for the first electron-positron storage ring in 1961. Philip Bryant from CERN then spoke on the CERN Interacting Storage ring and its legacy. In the afternoon, Peter Kalmus from Queen Mary spoke on The CERN proton- antiproton collider project, Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith on the genesis of the Large Hadron Collider, and Brian Foster from Oxford on future energy- frontier colliders. The second meeting was held at Birmingham in June, and was a fairly short joint meeting of the History of Physics, Nuclear Physics, Nuclear Industry and Plasma Physics Groups of the IOP on Developments in Nuclear Fusion: 60 Years on from ZETA. From the strictly historical point of view, probably the most interesting talk was the first, given by Chris Warrick, Head of Communications at UKAEA, on ZETA itself and the subsequent developments in nuclear fusion. Kate Lancaster from York University gave a current account of inertial confinement fusion, while David Kingham from Tokamak Energy and Ian Chapman for the UKAEA gave fascinating account of the present work on tokamaks in the private and public sectors respectively. In July there was a meeting on Rutherford’s Chemists organised in Glasgow by Neil Todd in conjunction with the Royal Society of Chemistry. During the meeting it might be suggested that a theme developed that the reputations of some of ‘Rutherford’s Chemists’ – in particular Frederick Soddy and William Ramsay, despite their Nobel Prizes - had suffered at the hands, not so much of Rutherford as of Rutherford’s biographers. IOP History of Physics Newsletter November 2017 4 The first talk, given by Pierre Radvanyi from Orsay, presented a study of the work of Marie and Pierre Curie, including the discovery of polonium and radium, and their studies of radioactivity. The rest of the first day was devoted to accounts of the work of Soddy. Linda Richards from Oregon State University presented a wide-ranging account of his ideas. This included a discussion not only of his scientific work, first with Rutherford and then with Ramsay and later on his own, on radioactivity, in particular covering the ‘displacement law’ and the identification of isotopes, but also his later social, political and economic ideas. David Sanderson from Glasgow presented a general account of Soddy’s work at Glasgow University between 1904 and 1914, during which much of his work on radioactivity was performed. Finally, at the evening reception, John Faithfull of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow gave a talk on Soddy artefacts at the museum. The next day, Finlay Stuart of the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre presented an account of the work of William Ramsay, in particular his Nobel Prizewinning discovery of the noble gases, and Neil Todd described the results of his radiological survey and gamma ray analysis of the laboratory notebooks of Soddy and Ramsay. Then in the final session, Ted Davis discussed the work of Bertram Boltwood, in particular his ideas on radio dating, and Dieter Hoffmann from Berlin described the work of Otto Hahn and also presented Siegfried Niese’s paper on Georg von Hevesy. The last meeting of 2017, jointly sponsored with the Medical Physics and Magnetic Resonance Groups, was scheduled to be held in Nottingham in September. Unfortunately because of other meetings in magnetic resonance scheduled for the same day, the meeting was postponed until April 2018. It will be in memory of Sir Peter Mansfield, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2003 for his invention of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), who died earlier this year. It will include talks on the history of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and MRI in Britain, and also a number of talks on the recent developments in MRI. Andrew Whitaker IOP History of Physics Newsletter November 2017 5 Meetings Rutherford’s Chemists, Glasgow, 15th/16th July, 2017 A two-day meeting, co-sponsored by the Institute of Physics and Royal Society of Chemistry, to celebrate the centenary of the second scientific revolution and a unique collaboration between physics and chemistry. Pierre Radvanyi, Institut de physique nucléaire, Orsay, France. Marie and Pierre Curie and the discovery of radioactivity Prompted by the discovery of X rays by W.C. Röntgen, H. Becquerel investigated whether a very phosphorescent uranium salt did also emit X rays. In these experiments, in March 1896, Becquerel discovered what he called “uranic rays”. In the Fall of 1897, Marie Curie Sklodowska wished to prepare a PhD in science at the Sorbonne university (she would become the first woman in Paris to obtain such a degree). She decided to investigate if other chemical elements did also emit such “uranic rays”. Her husband Pierre Curie constructed the necessary apparatus. She looked also at uranium minerals and found surprisingly that these were more active than pure uranium. Marie and Pierre continued their searches together. In July 1898 they discovered polonium and in December 1898 radium, using a new physico- chemical method. The denomination “radio-activity” was introduced for the first time by Marie Curie. A number of questions were immediately raised by these discoveries. What were the properties of the rays emitted? Where does their energy come from? At this point at first E. Rutherford alone, then E. Rutherford and F. Soddy, joined in the quest to answer these questions. In the following years, Marie wished to separate pure radium and measure its atomic weight, which she succeeded in doing in 1910. Pierre devoted himself to its physical properties, and launched the first medical applications of radioactivity. He died early in a street accident in 1906. Linda Richards, Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA. Frederick Soddy - Transmutation in science and society It is fitting Sir Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy first met in a public debate over atomic matter, because Soddy was consumed by what mattered most about atomic energy, for good or ill. While it was Rutherford who received fame for the two men’s 1901-3 collaboration on disintegration theory, Soddy reached far beyond chemical and physical science to frame transmutation as a new kind of alchemy for IOP History of Physics Newsletter November 2017 6 mankind. Soddy felt imbued with a special responsibility, having been given a glimpse of how the atomic and chemical structure of the universe was determined.