ABSTRACT
Rutherford's insistence on the centrality of his own reductionist form of experimental physics was more than hubris. Yet behind the public face of optimism and projected unification, all was not well with the reductionists' experimental programme. This public articulation of Cantabrigian experimental reductionism reached its apotheosis when Rutherford took the Presidential Chair of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) at Liverpool in September 1923. Elaborate protocols were required in order to ensure consistency between one count and the next, between different runs of the same experiment and between different series of experiments. The shift was reinforced by a simultaneous set of changes in the relationship between experimentalists and mathematical theoreticians. Out of this new confluence of experimental and theoretical technique flowed new modes of practice, new epistemological commitments and new discoveries. For the physicists, unification by experiment turned out to be a fiction; for the fiction writers and the propagandists, it was more real than reality.
