In 1907 Ernest Rutherford (later named ‘The Crocodile’ by Peter Kapitza), 36 years old and already a world–famous physicist, moved from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, to the University of Manchester, England. In the same year Niels Bohr (later known by some as ‘The Elephant’––he was one of the very few non–royal recipients of the Order of the Elephant), a 22–year–old student at the University of Copenhagen, received the gold medal of the Royal Danish Academy for his first research project, an experimental and theoretical study of water jets. During the next 30 years, until Rutherford's death in 1937, these two great scientists dominated quantum physics. Rutherford was the father of nuclear physics; together they founded atomic physics; and, with their students and colleagues, they were responsible for the great majority of the decisive advances made in the inter–war years. This lecture tells the story of the development in quantum physics, and makes some comparisons between Bohr and Rutherford–as men and scientists–drawing especially on their extensive correspondence between 1912 and 1937, the material that Bohr gathered in connection with the publication in 1961 of his Rutherford Memorial Lecture, the interviews that he gave just before his death in 1962, and other published and unpublished material from the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen.
The NUMEN Project: Toward New Experiments with High-Intensity Beams
