Some recollections and reflections on Rutherford

When I attempt to recall Rutherford, from my first interview in 1929/30 I seek some prompting from my incidental notes and those of others. In 1929, Rutherford was only 58 but his achievements had been great and widely acclaimed and he had been awarded the Order of Merit. We are told that Niels Bohr felt it necessary to be diplomatic when he sent George Gamow to visit him. To quote Gamow ‘Bohr wanted me to go to England to show my calculations to Rutherford, but he told me I must be very careful in presenting the quantum theory of nuclear transformation to him since the old man did not like any innovations and used to say that any theory is good only if it is simple enough to be understood by a barmaid. The difficulty was that... to explain the decay of uranium along classical lines, Rutherford imagined that an alphaparticle during the early stages of its emission consists of four neutral protons (a polyneutron, as one would say now) and thus is not influenced by the electric charge of the nucleus. . . Rutherford believed that at a certain distance from the nuclear surface the two electrons accompanying the alpha particle, like two tugs pulling a large ship out of a narrow harbour, become disengaged and return to port, while the ship continues to speed up on its own power’. Gamow concludes ‘This certainly was a brilliant idea which, however, was unfortunately disposed of by the newborn wave mechanics.’