Quotes about Ernest Rutherford

14 Sourced Quotes

Biology was referred to as a "dirty science," an activity, according to the physicist Ernest Rutherford, not much better than "postage stamp collecting." At best it was a second-class, "provincial" science.

[Rutherford] was a little disappointed, because it was so very difficult to find out anything really important.

Neutrinos have yet to play the role which Rutherford designed for his alpha particles, but... there is still hope that the analogues exploration may take place.

Leon M. Lederman

Although the problem of transmuting chemical elements into each other is much older than a satisfactory definition of the very concept of chemical element, it is well known that the first and most important step towards its solution was made only nineteen years ago by the late Lord Rutherford, who started the method of the nuclear bombardments.

When Rutherford was done with the atom all the solidity was pretty well knocked out of it.

Stephen Leacock

Then I went to the Cavendish and there I took Rutherford's course in nuclear physics. He was a very dramatic lecturer and full of anecdotes. He made it come alive. So this was very impressive—also very phenomenological, everything he did; very simple derivations. I think that's very important for the first learning and this is perhaps something students now miss. They get the theory of nuclear physics thrown at them; sometimes before they ever know there is a phenomenon they have the complete theory of it. The phenomena are not sufficiently emphasized, I think, in teaching today.

Maurice Goldhaber

No king or minister could have instructed Newton to discover the law of gravity, for they did not know and could not know that there was such a law to discover. No Treasury official told Fleming to discover penicillin. Nor was Rutherford instructed to split the atom by a certain date...

C. Northcote Parkinson

Rutherford did not pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but he understood that the Gamow formula would give his accelerator a crucial advantage. Even particles accelerated at much lower energies... would be able to penetrate into nuclei. Rutherford invited Gamow to Cambridge in January 1929... [They] became firm friends and Gamow's insight gave Rutherford the impetus to go full steam ahead with the building of his accelerator.

Not until the pioneer work of Rutherford and his colleagues was the possibility of nuclear reactions and transformations as sources of stellar energy envisaged.

Gerald James Whitrow

Dear Professor Rutherford, We students of our university physics club elect you our honorary president because you proved that atoms have balls.

10 October 1929, in USSR

Rutherford's discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics.... The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium... discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay... The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics.... Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics.

Rutherford was a disaster. He started the 'something for nothing' tradition…the notion that research can always be done on the cheap…The war taught us differently. If you want quick and effective results you must put the money in.

Most of the scientists in their twenties and thirties who went in 1939 to work on wartime problems were profoundly affected by their experience. The belief that Rutherford's boys were the best boys, that we could do anything that was do-able and could master any subject in a few days was of enormous value.

The year that Rutherford died there disappeared for ever the happy days of free scientific work which gave us such delight in our youth. Science has lost her freedom. Science has become a productive force. She has become rich but she has become enslaved and part of her is veiled in secrecy.