The Fly in the Cathedral

Richard Panek

Cathcart, a former reporter for Reuters and The Independent of London, may lack a formal background in physics, but he has a talent for making the scientific process accessible to nonspecialists. When he focuses on the pursuit rather than the pursuers, he captures the considerable suspense and exhilaration among physicists of the 20's and 30's solving some of the fundamental questions about the workings of the universe. ''The gods on Olympus did not have a better time,'' he writes. It's unfortunate that Walton and Cockcroft were apparently constitutionally incapable of joining the fun.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Cathcart (Test of Greatness: Britain's Struggle for the Atom Bomb), a former reporter for Reuters, presents a superb account of the genesis of nuclear physics in the first third of the 20th century. Although the centerpiece of his story is the experiment performed on April 14, 1932, by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in which an atom of lithium was split into two alpha particles (they would win a Nobel prize for this 19 years later), Cathcart fully describes the experiment's scientific and social context. Through crisp prose, interesting analogies and ample insight, he makes the basics of nuclear physics accessible while demonstrating the passion scientists have for their work. Cockcroft and Walton both worked under Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford at the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University at a time when precious little was known about the nucleus at the center of every atom. The race to understand the inner workings of the nucleus and to split an atom into its component parts was an international one, including labs in Germany, Denmark, Russia and the United States. The great progress that was made in a short time was all the more amazing given that labs had limited budgets and virtually all equipment first had to be conceptualized and then made from scratch. Cathcart instills in the reader a sense of excitement as the nuclear age unfolds around the world. B&w illus. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An engaging, well-researched account of nuclear physics 75 years ago. As British journalist Cathcart (Test of Greatness, not reviewed) tells us, the nucleus in an atom is like a fly in a cathedral. This 1909 revelation about atomic structure launched an international contest to dissect things further-to split the atom. The Brits won. John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, young researchers working under the enthusiastic direction of Sir Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge's Cavendish laboratory, built the first particle accelerator that did the job. It sent a stream of protons into a target of lithium-the lightest of all solid elements-and what the pair observed on the scintillation screen were flashes of alpha particles. By atomic arithmetic, the protons, of atomic weight 1, were hitting lithium nuclei, of weight 7, and literally splitting them into two, yielding a pair of alpha particles, each of weight 4. Cathcart details the nuts-and-bolts story of building the apparatus out of long glass cylinders connected to rectifiers, condensers, and transformers, all to build up to a charge of 800,000 volts. Inevitably, transformers would blow, gas would leak, there would be creepage, seepage, sparks, and other disasters that, however daunting, did not dash the hopes of Cockcroft and Walton, truly modest and patient fellows. Meanwhile, back in Berkeley, a young Ernest Lawrence was experimenting with a circular accelerator, a "cyclotron," competing with other American and German teams. The early 1930s belonged to experimentalists, Cathcart notes, a point he underscores in relating the work of John Chadwick, also at the Cavendish, who discovered the neutron in 1932. But in that time of theoretical fomentand confusion, due credit belongs to George Gamow, whose quantum mechanical explanation of how particles get in and out of atomic nuclei inspired the folks at the Cavendish, who deservedly would go on to win Nobel prizes. A wonderful celebration of hands-on physics back in the days before megateams presided over megabuck atom-smashers.