Recollections of Lord Rutherford

Abstract

I am greatly honoured by the invitation of the President of the Royal Society to speak to you on my reminiscences of Lord Rutherford. But this is a very difficult task and I accepted it after long deliberation. At first sight I thought that to speak about the scientific achievements of so great a scientist as Rutherford would be easy. The greater the achievements of a scientist the more exactly and briefly can they be described. Rutherford created the modern study of radioactivity; he was the first to understand that it is the spontaneous disintegration of the atoms of radioactive elements. He was the first to produce the artificial disintegration of the nucleus and finally he was the first to discover that the atom has a planetary system. Each of these achievements is sufficient to make a man a great physicist. But nowadays these achievements and their fundamental values are well known not only to research students but even to schoolboys. Equally we all know the very simple and beautiful classical experiments by means of which Rutherford made his great discoveries. To come from the Soviet Union to speak about all this to the Fellows of the Royal Society would scarcely be appropriate.