Particle Lord: The importance of being Ernest

At primary school, two great Kiwi heroes were always impressed upon our young minds with patriotic fervour. Astonishingly, neither were All Blacks, but both had rural beginnings and were given unassuming names beginning with ‘E’, as they began their long journeys toward embedding New Zealand in the awareness of the rest of the world.

The spectacular accomplishment of Sir Edmund Hillary was easy for us to grasp; ‘conquering’ the world’s highest mountain immediately conjured exciting and heroic images. But the achievements of Ernest Lord Rutherford seemed far more esoteric. Being confidently told that he was the first man to ‘split the atom’ certainly sounded important. A statue in Shanghai depicting a very muscular and golden man, (wearing only a moustache), resolutely forcing a giant atomic sphere apart might be close to what we tried to imagine. Or even the equally literal banner from 1923 showing a burly arm wielding a tomahawk about to cleave an innocent glowing orb cowering on an anvil.

Today Ernest Rutherford is known more simply and accurately as the ‘Father of Nuclear Physics’. He was the first to understand and prove that atoms, (named after the greek word for ‘uncuttable’), were themselves made of even smaller particles within a nucleus.

On later putting his revelation to the test, (the famous ‘splitting’), where he transmuted nitrogen into oxygen by bombarding and fissuring its nucleus with alpha particles, Rutherford was quoted as exclaiming: “(I have) broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter.”

Ern, as he was familiarly known, was born the fourth of twelve children near Brightwater, in 1871. Unlike most children, when Rutherford received his first school science book it didn’t remain in his desk, but the actively-minded boy quickly put the experiments within its pages into practice. He was soon found dismantling and reassembling the family clock, or outside during a thunderstorm calculating the distance from the storm centre by counting between thunderclaps. A statue of him as a very young schoolboy, with this book tucked under one arm, stands at Brightwater today.

On turning eleven, his family moved to Havelock and he received further education in a small schoolhouse with over ninety other children. The converted building still exists now, with hopefully less occupants crammed inside, at the Rutherford Backpackers hostel.

Rutherford excelled at school, but his family were financially unable to help the promising young researcher continue his education. However, winning a student scholarship, (on second attempt), allowed him to board at Nelson College for the next three years.

In wonderfully typical Kiwi fashion, he not only became Dux, but also played for the First XV Rugby team.

Another scholarship allowed Rutherford to further his studies at university in Christchurch in 1890. This was an especially busy time in the young man’s life. His mathematical ability granted him an honours year, which enabled Rutherford to develop his reputation as an outstanding researcher in the new field of electromagnetism.

But his continuing education apparently extended beyond the laboratory. During this period he boarded with the young woman who he would later marry, Mary Newton. Mary’s mother was secretary of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which played a crucial role in New Zealand becoming the first country in the world to grant women the vote in 1893.

Rutherford had come from a family of six sisters and a schoolteacher mother. In the year that he had won his University scholarship four of the other nine nation recipients were women, and he studied with them in an academic environment which had always fostered gender equality.

In years to come he was to mentor several women research assistants. Eventually campaigning for England’s stuffily entrenched Cambridge University to afford the same equal rights to women which he had experienced back home, this ‘great booming bear of a man’ and former First XV player also proved himself to be a pioneering feminist.

At 23, Rutherford left New Zealand in 1895 with three university degrees and a science scholarship which