ABSTRACT
The guns of World War I fell silent in November of 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year. The Treaty of Versailles was signed seven months later, in June 1919. That June, marking the formal end of the Great War, also marked the completion of a series of experiments in Manchester, England, by Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford’s pondering over the results during the winter of 1910-1911 had culminated in his inspired nuclear atom of 1911. Rutherford’s picture of the nuclear process involved viewed the 14 particles inside the nitrogen nucleus as arranged in three a-particles, each of mass 4, plus two other particles, one of which is a proton. The first task of Rutherford after settling in at Cambridge was to reorganize the Cavendish Laboratory, renowned though it may have been as one of the world’s leading centers in experimental physics research.
