Science: Fifth Director

[See Cover)

King William IV (1765-1837) was a genial, well-meaning but rather muddle-some man whose niece, Victoria, succeeded him on the throne of England. Third son of George III, he had no great expectation during his youth of becoming England’s monarch. As the Duke of Clarence, he bestowed his ardors on a Mrs. Jordan, an actress, to whom he was faithful for many years and who bore him twelve children. At Teddington, not far from London, he used for his extraordinary menage a charming and spacious 18th Century brick palace. When the death of his niece, Princess Charlotte, moved him up to second place as a regal candidate, he kicked Mrs. Jordan out. After ascending the throne, he lived in the Teddington palace with his queen, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen.

William’s palace is today the nucleus of Britain’s National Physical Laboratories, an analogue of the Bureau of Standards in the U. S. Comprising nearly 30 buildings scattered over 50 acres, the Teddington laboratories check weights and measures, test and develop new materials for industry. It was there that the best shape for the Queen Mary’s hull was worked out. On the lower floor of the palace, technicians are busy in their workrooms. In 30 rooms on the upper two floors, recently refurbished, lives one of Britain’s most distinguished scientists, William Lawrence Bragg, an authority on electricity and crystallography who became director of the National Physical Laboratories last year. On their grass tennis court he and his handsome, winsome wife play tennis (Professor Bragg usually but not always wins), and on their smooth green lawn the Braggs and their four children have picnic-like teas, weather permitting, every afternoon. Their favorite room is the one in which Queen Adelaide died.

Last week there was an unwonted scurry and bustle on the top floors of King William’s palace. The reason was not the war panic swirling over Europe, but the fact that William Lawrence Bragg, having hardly settled down at Teddington, had been appointed to a newer and loftier post: Cavendish Professor at Cambridge University. “Cavendish Professor” means director of the Cavendish Laboratory for experimental physics. This post, which Bragg takes over this week, is regarded— in England at least—as the world’s top scientific job.

“Mecca.” Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory is not only unique in England; it has no parallel in the world. To create its like, it would be necessary to snatch two or three top-flight experimental physicists from each of four or five U. S. universities—say Harvard. M. I. T., Caltech, Columbia, Chicago—put them to work together and then miraculously endow the new institution with the tradition and prestige of 68 years of brilliant achievement. Cambridge’s Arthur Stanley Eddington, an astronomer and no Cavendish man himself, has described the laboratory as a “Mecca of physics for the Empire.” Reason for Cavendish’s supremacy may be simply stated. Cambridge and Oxford are the only two British universities with whopping endowments to provide the equipment necessary to attract distinguished researchers from outside. Although Oxford is getting a fine new post-graduate medical school and already has a world-famed low-temperature laboratory, it has otherwise been content to leave Cambridge a clear field for leadership in science. Oxford’s angel is Lord Nuffield, automobile maker. Cambridge’s No. 1 benefactor in recent years is another motor-maker, Herbert Austin, 1st Baron Austin, who, now 71, made his first car in 1895, competes with Nuffield for the nebulous honor of being called “the Henry Ford of England.” In 1936 Austin gave Cavendish $1,250,000. Some of the equipment made possible by this gift has been completed and more is under way.

On the Record. A list of achievements at Cavendish would include the following:

>In 1897, Sir J. J. Thomson discovered the electron.

> In 1911, C. T. R. Wilson invented the cloud chamber. This device makes visible the fantastically rapid paths, straight, curved, or broken, of electrons and other subatomic particles. The cloud chamber contains water vapor or other fluid vapor which, suddenly expanded by a piston, condenses along the particle paths in fog droplets that show up in photographs as white streaks.

>In 1919, Ernest Rutherford (later Lord Rutherford), accomplished the first disintegration of an atom’s nucleus, the first transmutation of one element into another. Using for bullets the particles which fly naturally out of radium, Rutherford made oxygen out of nitrogen.

>In 1919, Francis William Aston invented the mass-spectrograph, which measures the mass of atoms by recording their paths in a magnetic field. The principle is that the degree of curvature of an atom’s path under magnetic attraction depends on its mass. This instrument was of enormous value in the study of isotopes, which are atoms of the same element having different weights.

>In 1932, John Douglas Cockroft and E. T. S. Walton performed the first artificial nuclear disintegrations. Using protons (hydrogen nuclei) speeded up in a high-voltage combination of transformers, rectifiers and condensers, Cockroft and his co-worker split lithium atoms, created helium.

>Also in 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron, a particle having no electric charge.*

Most other British universities where experimental physics holds high rank have onetime Cavendish men as department heads. Three men (Thomson, Aston and Wilson) were awarded Nobel Prizes while working at Cavendish. Rutherford was already a Nobel Laureate when he went from Manchester to Cavendish. Chadwick got his Nobel Prize a month after he had left Cavendish for Liverpool. Among the foreign bigwigs who have studied at Cavendish are two other Nobelists: Niels Bohr of Denmark and Arthur Holly Compton of Chicago. This bombardment of laurels seems exceedingly likely to continue.

Free School Lane. The Cavendish Laboratory came to birth in 1870 when the Seventh Duke of Devonshire (whose family name was Cavendish) gave Cambridge $31,500 to start a physics department. First building was a three-story, L-shaped affair which is still standing, though its once-white stone is now black with age. First director was James Clerk Maxwell, a Scotsman who as a schoolboy wore lace frill collars, a tunic and square-toed shoes, was considered peculiar by his mates. They were quite right. When he was hardly past 30, Maxwell invented electro-magnetic waves (e.g., wireless waves) out of his head, then proved mathematically that their speed must equal that of light. British physical scientists rank Maxwell second only to Isaac Newton. His immortal set of four equations, deemed a thing of beauty by scientific esthetes, is Exhibit A for apprentice theorists.

Maxwell was careful to choose a site that would be free of vibration. He finally picked Free School Lane, a narrow little street several hundred yards back from King’s Parade where stand most of the Cambridge colleges. Free School Lane is still barred to all forms of transportation—except bicycles and shoe leather. In the early clays of Cavendish, equipment was meagre. When the august Royal Society condescended to send up an electro-dynamometer from London, the rejoicing among Cavendish students almost became undignified.

Second director was furry-visaged John William Strutt, Baron Rayleigh, who discovered the “noble” gases (Argon, Helium, etc.) and made the most accurate contemporary determinations of the ohm and the ampere. He got a Nobel Prize 20 years after he retired from the Cavendish directorship. Third director was Sir Joseph John Thomson, who held the post for 35 years, discovered the electron while studying electric discharge in gases. Still alive, a Grand Old Man of 82, Sir Joseph strolls about in a black bowler with a cane clutched behind his back, attends “hall” (dinner) once a week, still putters in an old laboratory, is said by irreverent students never to take a bath. He got his Nobel Prize in 1906.

Lord Rutherford, discoverer of the atom’s nucleus, pioneer atom-smasher and fourth Cavendish Professor, died last year.

Born in New Zealand, he maintained to the end the earthy gruffness of an outlander. Sir Arthur Eddington says that Rutherford used to “pull my leg” because Sir Arthur was a mere theorist. Enormously respected and revered by the Cavendish workers, Rutherford was rated by them a hard taskmaster. When he went down to London for the Thursday meetings of the Royal Society, the pace of work at Cavendish noticeably slackened.

Work & Money. Hard work, however, is the general rule at Cavendish, although the staffers sometimes knock off early in summer to play cricket. The staff numbers some 60 researchers, of whom per-haps ten leave every year for other posts or retirement. These are replaced by bright newcomers, half from Cambridge, half from outside. About 200 undergraduates studying physics also work at Cavendish. Its lecture halls are antiquated and barnlike, its benches are uncomfortable. All the buildings are old and ramshackle, except the Mond Laboratory for low-temperature research, for which Sir Robert Ludwig Mond, gas & oil tycoon and amateur scientist, provided $75,000 in 1932. The Mond Laboratory, which has vibration-damping walls and sleek steel and scarlet furniture in the director’s offices, has attained the creditable mark of .02° C. above Absolute Zero.

Some $75,000 of Baron Austin’s money will go for modernizing the lecture halls. A big new laboratory for research on the atom—with library, conference room and tea room—will eat up $500,000. Another $50,000 went into a 36-ft. high-voltage atom-smasher. This hurls atomic bullets at controlled energies up to 2,000,000 electron-volts. Still another $30,000 was laid out for a cyclotron—an atom-smashing machine of the type invented by the University of California’s Ernest Orlando Lawrence, which spirals atomic bullets up to huge speeds by repeated electrical kicks.

For many years Cavendish has conducted research on the ionosphere (radio mirror surrounding Earth) by means of reflected radio signals. This work is in charge of Edward V. Appleton. generally considered the world’s No. 1 authority on the ionosphere, who first discovered that the radio mirror consists of two or more shifting layers.

The Braggs. Such is the domain which comes into the hands of Sir William Lawrence Bragg, fifth Cavendish Professor. Like his predecessor, Lord Rutherford, Professor Bragg, 48, was born in the Dominions. His father is Sir William Henry Bragg, who has a scientific reputation no less lustrous than his son’s. In 1885 the elder Bragg sailed from England to assume a professorship of mathematics and physics at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Primarily a mathematician, he bought a batch of textbooks, boned up on physics during the voyage out.

Son William remembers that he watched his father and maternal grandfather send Australia’s first wireless signals. With equal vividness he recalls the awe with which he regarded a piece of radium brought to Australia by Frederick Soddy, famed pioneer in the study of isotopes. When William was 18 his father returned to England to assume a professorship at Leeds. William graduated from Cambridge’s Trinity College, started research work at Cavendish under Electron-Discoverer Thomson. About that time the elder Bragg showed his son some reports by Germany’s Max von Laue. who was finding curious bright spots when X-rays are diffracted by crystals. Father and son joined forces, undertook intensive study of X-ray diffraction. They not only measured the wave lengths of X-rays (thousands of times shorter than those of visible light) but also penetrated the secrets of atomic architecture in crystalline substances. For these achievements William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize in 1915.

War & Peace. When the World War broke out, William Lawrence Bragg enlisted at once, went to France with an artillery battery. Soon he was shifted to research on military instruments. He was in Flanders when word came of his Nobel award. At the time, he says, the honor seemed ‘”unimportant.” At 25, he was the youngest man ever to receive it.

Last week England was in a state of war fever resembling 1914. The preoccupations of Cavendish men are not those of military and naval technicians, but the abilities of Cavendish men are decidedly of military and naval use. In 1914 the Cavendish staff scattered to Government service almost overnight. But Rutherford stuck to his experiments, which seemed to him to be leading toward splitting the atom. On one occasion he put off a committee of scientists, seeking his help on a method for submarine detection, by saying that if he could prove atomic disintegration it would be more important than the war itself. Whether Bragg will have to face decisions of this sort, and what he would decide is problematical.

What Professor Bragg wants of his Cavendish co-workers is keenness, vitality, imagination. A sophisticated and charming man himself, he expects scientists to be human beings and citizens of the world as well as seekers for knowledge. Some time ago he make this pronouncement:

“Scientists have been getting a lot of hard knocks lately. They are pictured as soulless people, embodiments of cold, cruel reason; simply great bulging brains, ticking over with remorseless accuracy. Yet in his domestic life the scientist is often looked upon with condescension. A well-trained professor is something rather nice to have around the house. My cook once said to me: ‘Please, Sir, will you come out and oil the vacuum. It’s gone and fused.’ ”

* Frequently called “the annus mirabilis of experimental physics.” In the same year the positive electron and the doubleweight atom of hydrogen were discovered in the U. S. by Carl David Anderson of Caltech and Harold Clayton Urey of Columbia respectively.