ABSTRACT
The title of his lecture was the ‘Nuclear Constitution of Atoms,’ and in it Ernest Rutherford spoke of the nuclear disintegration experiments, suggesting that matter consists of two fundamental building blocks, electrons and protons. Particles notwithstanding, several teams were poised as well for important progress in nuclear reactions and transformations by artificial means, with particle accelerator technology approaching the requisite stage of maturity. Harold C Urey was born on a farm in Indiana in 1893. He graduated from Montana State University with a BSc degree in 1917, worked for a period with a chemical industrial laboratory in Philadelphia, taught chemistry at Montana State, and in 1921 began graduate work in chemistry at UC-Berkeley under Lewis, with a minor in physics. To Carl Anderson’s annoyance, the editor of Science News Letter, in which a photograph of one of the renegade tracks was first published, suggested calling the new particle the positron, and Anderson left it at that.
