We are here in the basement of the Royal Society in London, The Royal Society is the UK National
Academy for Sciences and we are here because there is an exhibition about Rutherford.
We are interested in the element Rutherfordium which is right here at the bottom of the periodic
table number 104, and with these elements only tiny amounts, relatively few atoms have
been made so we can’t tell you about how it is used in light bulbs or something like
that because it has not been used for anything. People are really excited if they make one
or two atoms of it. So instead we are going to tell you a bit about Rutherford after whom
it’s named. And Rutherford is famous because he did a whole series of experiments, or he
and his co-workers, that really explained the structure of atoms and so the periodic
table for the first time really began to make sense. Over here you can see there is a picture
of Rutherford here in his lab with one of his co-workers and this is a very famous picture.
Rutherford, who came from New Zealand, had a very loud voice and the experiments were
rather sensitive, if you talked too loud the apparatus started shaking and it did not work
properly, so his students put up a big notice in the lab saying talk softly please. But
I am not sure that it stopped him and I use this picture when I am talking to my students
about safety, you’ve always got to be really safe when you are working as a chemist. First
of all you can see that Rutherford is smoking in the lab and then he is not wearing safety
glasses, nor is his colleague, and then they have a whole series of wires and all sorts
of things to trip over. So it is really surprising that they managed to get their experiments
to work without some sort of serious accident. Perhaps they did break things and never told
us about it. Anyway Rutherford’s work was recognised by him winning the Nobel Prize
and here, and it is quite exciting, there is a replica of the Nobel Prize. The Nobel
Prize is a gold medal but here they have shown it as two half-medals, underneath there is
nothing to see, so you can see both of the sides. So on one side there is the portrait
of Alfred Nobel, whose money and foundation, still to this day, pays for prize money, when
he received this it would have been presented to him by the Swedish King in a huge ceremony
in Stockholm. Now what I can’t remember is whether he got the Nobel Prize for physics
or chemistry. I have a feeling…
Chemistry!
Yes. I have a feeling that he got it for chemistry which was particularly funny because Rutherford
didn’t like chemistry. He said that there is just physics and stamp collecting and he
did not really respect chemistry so perhaps the chemists got their revenge by giving him
the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
Now Rutherford had very strong views about the hours his students should work and they
were not allowed to work after 6 o’clock at night in the lab and his chief technician
would go round the lab at 6 o’clock and switch off all the apparatus and chase everybody
out of the lab. And even though they did this, 11 of his students won Nobel Prizes; this
must be one of the records for any single research group to this day. And of course
when they went home having had dinner and drank wine in the college then they started
working writing papers. But it is very interesting that if you read letters from visiting American
scientists they could not understand how Rutherford’s lab was so successful because the people came
in at 10 o’clock in the morning they went home at 6, and did not seem to do any work
at all, but they discovered all these wonderful things.
What’s your policy on your students working then?
Well I always encourage my students to work but I find that if I encourage them too hard,
it has the opposite effect, just like parents telling children to do their homework but
by and large when people are enthusiastic about their science it is difficult to stop
them working too much.
As part of this exhibition they have got some postcards of Rutherford and this one has got,
I think it is really terrific, shows Rutherford in the sea. But I really like this because
it shows that famous scientists sometimes take time off and they don’t always behave
like white-coated figures in labs, but they do have a human side as well.