8 The Most Accurate Theory in Physics
145
around their yards, colliding with fences and gates. The sheer
ferocity of nature’s display made a deep impression on the
young Ernest.
Much damage was done that night. Stock lay dead from lightning strikes and many trees were uprooted. However, as is the
lot of country folk the world over, disasters were put aside, the
routine of daily life resumed, and memories faded.
For one small boy, however, the storm was a watershed, and
the path of his life took a new direction. Ernest became introverted and thoughtful. Sometimes he would sit at the table
with knife and fork in hand, and stare into space, contemplating some problem of a scientific nature. His siblings drew
their father’s attention to him with their friendly banter: “Dad,
look at Ern. He’s away again.”
In the following years, the young Rutherford developed into
his country’s greatest scientist, and departed from the land of
his birth, as so many of his generation did, to pursue his career
overseas. There he achieved the Nobel Prize, the greatest of
all accolades, and became recognised as “the father of nuclear
physics.” His work motivated others, and in the dark period of
the Second World War, it was turned to the construction of the
ultimate weapon.
And so it came to be that on the 6th August, 1945, sixty-five
years after the death of that lonely butterfly in an Amazonian
rainforest, an American B-29 bomber took off from Tinian, one
of the Northern Mariana Islands, and set a course for Hiroshima.
This time the fiery tempest that was unleashed changed not just
one man’s destiny, but the course of human history for all time.
∗ ∗ ∗
In this Chapter, we see how Rutherford’s experimental work set the basis
for a deep understanding of the interactions inside the atom, and led eventually to one of the most accurate theories in the whole of physics, a theory
with a precision equivalent to predicting the distance from the earth to the
moon with an accuracy of half a millimetre. 1 And yet, hidden away in the
1 We should mention here that the accuracy with which General Relativity has been verified is
continuously improving, especially with regard to the observation of binary systems (see Appendix
7.4) and may well rival that of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) to be discussed later in this
Chapter.
145
around their yards, colliding with fences and gates. The sheer
ferocity of nature’s display made a deep impression on the
young Ernest.
Much damage was done that night. Stock lay dead from lightning strikes and many trees were uprooted. However, as is the
lot of country folk the world over, disasters were put aside, the
routine of daily life resumed, and memories faded.
For one small boy, however, the storm was a watershed, and
the path of his life took a new direction. Ernest became introverted and thoughtful. Sometimes he would sit at the table
with knife and fork in hand, and stare into space, contemplating some problem of a scientific nature. His siblings drew
their father’s attention to him with their friendly banter: “Dad,
look at Ern. He’s away again.”
In the following years, the young Rutherford developed into
his country’s greatest scientist, and departed from the land of
his birth, as so many of his generation did, to pursue his career
overseas. There he achieved the Nobel Prize, the greatest of
all accolades, and became recognised as “the father of nuclear
physics.” His work motivated others, and in the dark period of
the Second World War, it was turned to the construction of the
ultimate weapon.
And so it came to be that on the 6th August, 1945, sixty-five
years after the death of that lonely butterfly in an Amazonian
rainforest, an American B-29 bomber took off from Tinian, one
of the Northern Mariana Islands, and set a course for Hiroshima.
This time the fiery tempest that was unleashed changed not just
one man’s destiny, but the course of human history for all time.
∗ ∗ ∗
In this Chapter, we see how Rutherford’s experimental work set the basis
for a deep understanding of the interactions inside the atom, and led eventually to one of the most accurate theories in the whole of physics, a theory
with a precision equivalent to predicting the distance from the earth to the
moon with an accuracy of half a millimetre. 1 And yet, hidden away in the
1 We should mention here that the accuracy with which General Relativity has been verified is
continuously improving, especially with regard to the observation of binary systems (see Appendix
7.4) and may well rival that of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) to be discussed later in this
Chapter.