Abstract
THE Faraday Lecture to the Chemical Society was given at the Royal Institution on February 12 by Lord Rutherford. The title was “Radioactivity and Atomic Structure”; but Lord Rutherford, rightly, was less concerned with discussing the latest results in nuclear transformations than with giving a general account of the development of radioactivity in the past forty years, and relating its discoveries to the theories and ideas of the chemist. The personal note of the lecture was greatly appreciated by the audience. Lord Rutherford began by giving an account of his own work at Cambridge and Montreal in the early days, of the discovery of the emanating power of thorium, of the characteristic rate of decay of the emanation, of its odd power of ‘exciting’ or ‘inducing’ radioactivity in neighbouring solids, and the other work which led to the disintegration theory of Rutherford and Soddy in 1902-3. This was the first sustained attack on the chemist's concept of the atom as a solid and permanently stable structure, and the first hint that an explanation might be found some day for the existence of the periodic classification. He passed then to the great period 1911-13 when the nuclear theory of the atom was established, the group-displacement was put forward, and physicists and chemists were reluctantly compelled to believe in the existence of isotopes at least for the heaviest elements.
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Radioactivity and Atomic Structure. Nature 137, 307 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137307b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137307b0