There was, I think, a feeling that the best science was that done in the simplest way. In experimental work, as in mathematics, there was ‘style’ and a result obtained with simple equipment was more...

So this is where all the vapid talk about the ‘soul’ of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the...

His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science.{Describing Ernest Rutherford upon his death at age...

I’ve just finished reading some of my early papers, and you know, when I’d finished I said to myself, ‘Rutherford, my boy, you used to be a damned clever fellow.’ (1911)

The year that Rutherford died (1938) there disappeared forever the happy days of free scientific work which gave us such delight in our youth. Science has lost her freedom. Science has become a productive force....

The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory...