Just Finished Reading: The Fly in the Cathedral – How a small group of Cambridge scientists won the race to split the atom by Brian Cathcart

The history of 20^th Century science – particularly that of physics – has long fascinated me. At the end of the previous century it was considered that just about everything about the physical universe was understood. Only a few niggling problems remained to be solved. One of these problems concerned the nature of light whilst another sought to understand the structure of the atom. As scientists throughout the world delved into these areas instead of answering questions they generated more and worse still produced mysteries that seemed to be beyond anyone’s understanding.

In Cambridge the great New Zealand eccentric Lord Rutherford determined that the only way any of this would be understood is by experiment after experiment until something shook free. But first his team needed to build sophisticated enough apparatus to produce the effects that generated enough results for the theoreticians to work with and that apparatus was at the very edge of existing technology. They were stuck in the classic chicken and egg scenario. But slowly throughout the 1920’s and into the early 1930’s they managed to push forward the underlying technology they needed to run experiments at high enough voltages to produce the effects they needed. On lab desks throughout Europe and the US scientists, technicians and engineers built the very first particle accelerators – atom smashers – that first chipped away at the atomic structure and later smashed it completely.

All of this, painfully pieced together over decades by some of the greatest minds that ever lived, is one of the greatest stories ever told and one that is in the headlines again today as we edge closer to understanding where mass comes from with on-going search for the Higgs Boson. Needless to say the understanding of particle physics is fundamental to our understanding of the universe, everything that exists within it and probably why it exists in the first place. There is much within this field that I do not understand and probably never will. Yet I find the subject endlessly fascinating so keep trying to at least form an appreciation of what’s going on in the field and gain at least a partial understanding of how it all works. This book helped by filling in some of the historical background and a little of the actual science too. Being aimed at the lay reader it only assumes an interest in the subject and a very basic knowledge of atoms. Don’t be put off by the subject matter. The story of the very first atom smashers is a very human tale of men (and some women) that needed to know how everything fitted together. From there early discoveries to the present day we are finally approaching that very point – or at least so it seems. Maybe there is something just around the corner that will blow everything we think we know clean out of the water. That’s the real excitement of science.