The Rutherford Memorial Lecture, 1965

Lord Rutherford died at Cambridge in 1937 and the first Rutherford Memorial Lecture was delivered by Sir John Cockcroft fifteen years later at Canterbury College, part of the University of New Zealand, where Rutherford first matriculated in 1889. Since the date of that lecture nine further Memorial Lectures have been delivered in the main countries of the British Commonwealth. Two of these lectures were given in Canada, at the University of McGill, where as Professor of Physics from 1898 to 1907 Rutherford performed that remarkable series of experiments which laid the foundations of the science of radioactivity. It seemed to me appropriate, on this occasion of the third Memorial Lecture in Canada, to choose a laboratory further to the west, and the growth of the Physics depart­ment here at Saskatoon, with its present major enterprise for research upon atomic nuclei, made this choice both natural and personally attractive. In previous lectures of this series the achievements and character of that remarkable man whom we meet to honour today have been very fully described. Sir James Chadwick, in his lecture at McGill in 1953, gave a documentary account of Rutherford’s scientific career. Chadwick had worked with Rutherford at Manchester from 1910 until 1913, the critical period during which the nuclear atom was formulated, and then returned to Manchester in 1918 shortly after Rutherford’s first successful experiments upon the disintegration of nitrogen. With Rutherford he then extended these experiments to other elements and moving to Cambridge in 1919, when Rutherford accepted the Cavendish Chair, continued to work in collaboration with him during nearly the whole of the rest of Rutherford’s life. His description of that association must clearly be regarded as the definitive document upon Rutherford’s scientific work and attitude.