Word: atom
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Brussels was Britain's gruff, burly Lord Ernest Rutherford, great formulator of the atom's electrical structure, revered director of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. Also on hand was one of Rutherford's imaginative young workers, John Douglas Cockroft, who was at that time splitting lithium atoms by hurling protons at them. Cockroft energized his protons with high voltages obtained by transformers, rectifiers and condensers...
...years ago Cambridge announced that it would build an atom-smasher of the Lawrence type. The Cavendish workers now expect their machine to be running in about a month. But Lord Rutherford will never see it start. He died last week, aged 66, after failing to rally from an abdominal operation. His passing evoked expressions of grief and tribute from all over the scientific world. Said 80-year-old Sir J. J. Thomson, famed discoverer of the electron, who once was Rutherford's teacher: ''His work was so great that it cannot be compassed...
Like many another elderly and distinguished scientist, Britain's Lord Ernest Rutherford, great formulator of the atom's electrical structure, has a way of having his way. Few weeks ago he published an article in which he referred to the tripleweight atom of hydrogen, generally called tritium, as "triterium." When this verbal goblin reached the eye of Dr. Kenneth Claude Bailey, professor of physical chemistry and authority on chemical etymology at University of Dublin, Dr. Bailey promptly took pen in hand and wrote a letter of protest which appeared in Nature last week. Excerpt: "The word 'deuterium...
...seemed that he had a right to name it. The nucleus was called the "deuton." Dr. Rutherford did not like these names, especially "deuton," which he declared was likely to be confused by Englishmen with "neutron," particularly if the speaker had a cold. Lord Rutherford was for calling the atom "diplogen" and its nucleus the "diplon," and a number of British scientists seemed willing to follow his lead, despite a polite but barbed letter which Dr. Urey and his associates rushed off to England posthaste (TIME, Feb. 19, 1934). Peace was restored when Lord Rutherford agreed to accept "deuterium...
...starting a whole popularization movement within his university, now plans to write a few serious publications to satisfy sticklers among his colleagues, spend the rest of his life composing "funny books" like From Galileo to Cosmic Rays-one of them, soon to be published, a breezy discussion of atom-smashing...