Characters in Rutherford's life
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Albert Einstein the theorist and Ernest Rutherford the experimenter were the antithesis of each other. But if a common point unites them, it is clearly their investment in international cooperation and for the promotion of peace.
During the First World War, Einstein was one of the few Germanic scholars not to sign the "Appeal of German intellectuals to civilized nations", a shameful denial of war crimes committed in Belgium.
Rutherford, for his part, forced to cut himself off from his German and Austrian friends and to give up his research to devote himself to submarine detection systems, will be one of the first to reconnect at the end of the conflict: While the scientists of the conquered countries are still ostracized by the conquerors, he will offer his Viennese colleagues, deprived of resources, an endowment of radium which will enable them to restart their laboratories.
Meeting between Einstein and Rutherford
1911 Brussels (Solvay Congress)
1913 Brussels (Solvay Congress)
1933: London (CARA)
Pictures:
Albert Einstein in 1912
Solvay 1911 Congress, notably bringing together Jean Perrin (P), Marie Curie (C), Ernest Rutherford (R) and Albert Einstein (E)
Colloquium at the Royal Albert Hall (October 3, 1933)
The two men met for the first time in Brussels in 1911, during the first Solvay congress. Einstein was one of the main contributors to this meeting (which he called a "witches' sabbath"), while Rutherford was rather in the background. He often confided that he did not fully grasp the ideas of his German colleague. Moreover, it was Rutherford's collaborators, foremost among them Niels Bohr and Harry Moseley, who mastered them much better, who made it possible to draw the links between relativity and the experimental conclusions developed in Manchester and, later, in Cambridge .
At the end of 1933, both equally famous, Einstein and Rutherford met in London as hatred spreads its web again over Europe. The first left Germany, thanks to the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), an association founded a few months earlier to assist Jewish scholars looted by the Nazis.
The second, still reluctant to get involved in politics, ended up accepting the presidency of this Council.
To alert the British to the situation in Germany and to raise funds for the Council, they both delivered a speech before 10,000 people gathered at the Royal Albert Hall on October 3, 1933.
Four days later, Einstein would reach the United States; he would never come back to Europe. For his part, Rutherford would continue to work, as he always had, with researchers around the world.
The AAC still exists and is called today "CARA" ( Council for At-Risk Academics ).
According to its website, "CARA provides urgently-needed help to academics in immediate danger, those forced into exile, and many who choose to work on in their home countries despite serious risks. "
Sources :
-
Rutherford, Scientist Supreme, book (1999) & website by John Campbell
-
Rutherford, Simple Genius, David Wilson
-
L'espace est une question de temps : Einstein et la relativité, David Blanco Laserna
-
The Einstein almanac, Alice Calaprice
-
The quantum theory of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Sommerfeld, Jagdish Mehra
-
Men Who Made a New Physics: Physicists and the Quantum Theory, Barbara Lovett Cline
-
How England Helped Albert Einstein Escape Nazi Germany, Time, 1st october 2019