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Ernest Rutherford The Father of Nuclear Physics
Doug West
2018 Self published?
ISBN 978-1-79214-122-5
62 pages. Soft Cover.
9 b/w photos and 2 b/w illustrations.
Purchasing Details.
Amazon
My Comments on This Book
This book is volume 34 of the 30 Minute Book Series, a short biography of a famous person all by the same author.
The concept is an excellent one but I cannot recommend this book in its current form due to the large number of errors. I found typically two on each page,
committed by someone who didn't know the Rutherford story well. A quote starts each chapter, taking from www.todayinscience.com. Those chosen
are often from the wrong time period or dodgy to start with. (For those interested in Rutherford quotes see www.rutherford.org.nz
under Miscellaneous/Rutherford quotes for the origin of Rutherford quotes.)
As the books may be printed individually to order, this problem could be fixed at source.
Errors Noted.
p 4 Canterbury was one of then three campuses of the University of New Zealand.
p 4 At Canterbury Rutherford developed a method of measuring very short current pulses. At Cambridge he developed it into a detector of wireless signals.
p 5 The 1851 scholarship allowed New Zealanders (and others of colonial Britain) to go to any university in the world, not just Oxford and Cambridge.
p 5 Maclauren was already married. The nomination form sent to him differed from the one he already had from 1892.
p 6 Bragg played no role in Rutherford's development. He was a colleague from WW1 onwards.
p 7 The Ch 2 quote applies to Rutherford's Cambridge II period, not Cambridge I.
p 7 Rutherford went to Cambridge because JJ had written one of the text books Rutherford used in NZ and they met and liked each other.
p 7 Cambridge had opened up a research degree for all non-Cambridge graduates. The demonstrators etc were against all non-Cambridge graduates, not just colonials.
p 8 Thomson didn't put Rutherford to work on his refining his Hertzian (radio) wave transmitter and detector. Rutherford first used his detector of short current pulses to measure the dielectric properties of materials.
p 8 Rutherford didn't lack the entrepreneurial skills. JJ made enquiries in London and found it would take too much finance to develop wireless signalling. There were already telegraph cables laid to most destinations.
p 9 Radioactivity was an accidental discovery a month after X-rays were reported.
p10 Thomson didn't put Rutherford onto radioactivity work.
p11 The Ch 3 quote is from Cambridge II, not the McGill period.
etc
Contents
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Ch 1 |
Growing up in New Zealand |
3
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Ch 2 |
Cambridge University |
7
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Ch 3 |
NMcGill University in Canada |
11
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Ch 4 |
The Victoria University of Manchester |
16
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Ch 5 |
The Rutherford Model of the Atom |
21
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Ch 6 |
World War 1 |
25
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Ch 7 |
The Cavendish Laboratory |
29
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Ch 8 |
Splitting the Atom |
81
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Reviews
Not known at this stage.
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