Sir Ernest Rutherford: It was on March 19, 1914, that the Royal Society held its last discussion on the constitution of the atom—just fifteen years ago. I had the honour to open the discussion on that occasion, and the other speakers were Mr. Moseley, Profs. Soddy, Nicholson, Hicks, Stanley Allen, S. P. Thompson. In my opening remarks I put forward the theory of the nuclear atom and the evidence in support of it, while Mr. Moseley gave an account of his X-ray investigations, which defined the atomic numbers of the elements, and showed how many gaps were present between hydrogen number 1 and uranium number 92. Prof. Soddy drew attention to the existence of isotopes in the radioactive series, and also to a remarkable observation by Sir Joseph Thomson and Dr. Aston, who had obtained two parabolas in the positive ray spectrograph of neon, and he suggested that possibly the ordinary elements might also consist of mixture of isotopes. I think you will find that the remarks and suggestions made in this discussion fifteen years ago have a certain pertinence to-day. In particular Hicks and Stanley Allen drew attention to the importance of taking into account the magnetic fields in the nucleus, although at that time we had very little evidence on that point, and even to-day our information is very scanty. What has been accomplished in the intervening period ? On looking back we see that three new methods of attack on this problem have been developed. The first, and in some respects the most important, has been the proof of the isotopic constitution of the ordinary elements, and the accurate determination of the masses or weights of the individual isotopes, mainly due to the work of Dr. Aston. This has led in a sense to an extension of the original ideas of Moseley. The experiments of the latter fixed the number of possible nuclear charges, while Aston has shown that there are a large number of species of atoms each defined by its nuclear charge, although their masses and their nuclear constitution may be different. The essential point brought out in the earlier work of Dr. Aston was that the masses of the elements are approximately expressed by whole numbers, where oxygen is taken as 16—with the exception of hydrogen itself. But the real interest, as we now see it, is not the whole number rule itself, but rather the departures from it.
Discussion on the structure of atomic nuclei
