Cambridge and the Cavendish

J.J. Thomson was elected Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge in 1884, and after new degree regulations were instituted in 1895, he led the Cavendish Laboratory to become the leading research school in experimental physics in the world. He relinquished the Cavendish Professorship in 1919 to become Master of Trinity College and was succeeded by his first research student, Ernest Rutherford, who led the Cavendish to become the leading research school in nuclear physics in the world. Rutherford attracted outstanding research students, among them Englishman John Cockcroft and Russian Peter Kapitza, both of whom were perceptive observers of Rutherford’s personality, style, and methods.

The Crocodile and the Elephant

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of his Rutherford Memorial Lecture, the interviews that he gave just before his death in 1962, and other published and unpublished material from the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen.

Letters from Kapitza to his mother, 1921-27

Peter Kapitza (1894—1984) came to England as a member of a Soviet mission sent to renew scientific relations with the West after the upheavals of World War I, the Revolution and the Civil War. He had recently suffered the tragic loss of his wife, their two young children and his father in the epidemics that raged in the Soviet Union at that time. It was partly to distract him from his grief that he was invited to join the mission, and A. F. Joffé, who had been his chief at the Physico-Technical Institute in Petrograd, thought it would be a good thing for him to get some first-hand experience of the latest research techniques by spending the winter in a leading physics laboratory in the West. Eventually, Rutherford agreed to have him in the Cavendish and Kapitza made such an impression by his originality and experimental skill that he was encouraged to extend his stay.

Piotr Leonidovich Kapitza, 9 July 1894 - 8 April 1984

Peter Kapitza was a legendary figure both in Rutherford’s Cambridge of the 1920s and 1930s and subsequently in Moscow to the end of his long life and the legends serve to illustrate his colourful personality. In his scientific work he showed great versatility and brought the skills of an engineer and mathematician to bear on important problems in physics and technology in an entirely original way. He also had broad cultural and social interests and his original ideas on scientific education and organization have had a profound influence, particularly on the development of Soviet physics.