How they 'split the atom' - Brian Trench

Good afternoon, my name is Brian Trench and I'm delighted to welcome you here on behalf of the Celsius group here at DCU about which I'll say a word in a moment. A very particular welcome if you don't mind me just drawing attention to it straight away to the members of the Walton family who are here. Philip, the son of ETSW, his wife Anne and their son Ian. Philip has assured me that they're keeping physics in the family going and his daughter is a physicist just as he, his brother and his sister have been physicists as well. As the title of this event indicates, we're recalling something that happened 80 years ago tomorrow. In fact there was some doubt as to whether it really happened on the 13th or the 14th but I'm sure Brian will put us absolutely right on that. Brian Cathcart. And we're doing so in the context of Dublin City of Science 2012. So we're looking at this not just as a key moment in 20th century science, which of course it was, but also in terms of its wider cultural, social resonance. And Brian Cathcart in particular in his book, this wonderful book The Fly in the Cathedral, and in the talk he will give us now in a moment, looks at how the news about this discovery was managed, in fact unsuccessfully. An attempt was made to manage it. I'm setting off some reactions here that I didn't intend. I'll turn it off. It's possible that Ty is interrupting, is interfering with me because these are actually high energy events that are going on with Ty. Ty is actually from CERN. I had to mention that at some stage. What was I saying before that? Yes, indeed that this is a bigger event than just, that the event of the 14th of April was not just a singular scientific event but also was a bigger cultural and social resonance. And this is one of just two, I think, is that right Brian? Surviving pictures that were taken by the media, indeed where the three gents made themselves available to the media, just long enough for two photographs to be taken. In the middle Ernest Rutherford, the head of the Cavendish Laboratory. On the left Ernest Walton and on the right John Cockcroft. And that was on the 2nd of May, taken on the 2nd of May 1932. And on that same day, the Irish Times in an editorial celebrated a triumph of science. And it remarked that the average man's knowledge of the atom is vague and thanks to recent fiction of the scientific school, rather terrifying. I think that's a reference probably to HG Wells which isn't that recent, but there you are. And it talks again about the plain man knows only that science has been striving in recent years to release and control the stored vigour of the atom as in earlier ages it pursued the philosopher's stone and that the splitting, in inverted commas, as we had it also in the title of this event, of the atom was an essential factor of success. It goes on to talk about the plain man a bit further and talks about the possibility of the splitting of the atom, with the splitting of the atom man becomes master of a destructive force, or could become master of a destructive force that enabled him to hold the world to ransom. This is a reference to the fiction of a scientific character. While Lord Rutherford's announcement is silent upon such horrific possibility, it is difficult he states to say to what this discovery may lead. Well we're in the fortunate position 80 years later of being able to say to what this discovery has led. And not all of it necessarily entirely welcome. At the end then it says it must be a cause of pride to all Irishmen that one of the two victors of the atom, Dr ETS Walton is a young graduate of Dublin University. The CELTIUS group which is hosting today's event set up about five or six years ago to support and to undertake research on the cultural, ethical, legal and social issues in science that gives you CELTIUS. It happened to be the 250th anniversary of the birth of CELTIUS so he was kind of in our consciousness at the time and we've organised annual symposia and seminars of various kinds over the years, including hosting the visit of Bruno Latour very recently to DCU, one of the pioneering figures in social studies of science. And there are a number of PhD students associated with the group. In organising this event as I said we are conscious that we are in the year of Dublin city of science and in doing this we're trying to contribute in some way to the putting into mainstream culture, and I can't find a more elegant way of saying it, but I can in French in a moment, putting into mainstream culture science, scientific institutions, scientific discoveries, scientific developments. Actually it's the French theoretical physicist who writes also essays on science, Jean-Marc Levy-Leblanc, who refers to la mise en culture de la science, the placing into culture of science. So that is partly what we are trying to achieve with organising an event of this kind, as indeed many other events of the city of science year are also doing. One measure of the place of science and culture, one small measure, might be the presence of representations of scientists on stamps. And actually if you were to consider scientists and scientific issues on Irish stamps you would say that Ireland was a very scientific culture, indeed. The only person ever to have been featured twice on a commemorative stamp is a scientist. Apparently you only get one chance at doing it, so I'm afraid, Ernest, you had your chance and this was on the centenary of his birth in 1903, 2003 the stamp was issued. William Rowan Hamilton actually appeared twice, but that's largely due to Deborah's great interest in William Rowan Hamilton. But here's a little one for you, if Ernest Walton has been commemorated on a stamp of Ireland, what other country do you think might have commemorated Ernest Walton on a stamp? This is a little bit, actually the Walton family are excluded from answering this question. This is a little bit about the physics of philately or the philately of physics. The answer is Saint Vincent and Grenadines. Now I bet none of you thought of that one. Actually Saint Vincent and Grenadines has actually issued a series of stamps with Nobel Prize winning scientists on them. Anyway, I hope we've established the context for this and we're going to hear first of all from Brian Cathcart, who I had the pleasure of introducing in a quite different context at another conference just two months ago and meeting at a previous conference just before that earlier in the year, one about journalism history, the next one about media diversity and today about the history of nuclear science. He may have time to tell you how he came to be interested in this, but he'd been writing about it for over 20 years and I think the first article that I came upon by Brian about Ernest Walton dates back to about 20 years ago and he's published this wonderfully well-told story, The Fly in the Cathedral, which I recommend to anybody who might even be bemused by the science of the so-called splitting of the atom, strongly recommend it to you. It's available in paperback and from most good bookstores if you try hard enough anyway. Brian is a journalist by background, a journalism lecturer, a journalism professor now in Kingston University in Surrey and as I say has a long-standing personal interest that really is outside of his professional activity as a journalism lecturer and professor in the history of nuclear science. Really his book, I just was speaking to somebody outside about his book and he said to me, well a science teacher said to me just recently, this is the best book about science that I know. It really is popular science of a kind that we need much more of. It tells a really great story, but in the telling of the story and in the painting of the characters and in the description of the apparatus, it really does lead us into the core of the scientific discovery process itself. So a great pleasure in welcoming Brian Cathcart.