MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIE TY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC
PUBLISHER Elizabeth Marincola
EDITOR IN CHIEF Tom Siegfried
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Few surprising discoveries
rival Rutherford’s nucleus
When Ernest Rutherford was born,
scientists regarded atoms as eternal.
James Clerk Maxwell, one of the
most perceptive physicists of the 19th
century, once declared that an atom
is “something which has existed either
from eternity or at least from times
anterior to the existing order of nature.”
When those words were written, in 1875, Rutherford was
4 years old. A quarter century later, he was deep into decon-
structing atoms, documenting their disintegrations from one
type into another. Some types of atoms, it turned out, were not
eternal but ephemeral, decaying into atoms of other identities,
in the process releasing energy of unfathomable magnitude.
By 1911, Rutherford had identified the atom’s internal storehouse for all that energy — the dense, positively charged core
that came to be known as the atomic nucleus (see Page 30).
Science and the modern world at large were both transformed by that discovery, which a century later still reverberates in international politics, national economies and
technological calamities. Atomic bombs, nuclear energy and
all sorts of insights into the nature of matter stemmed from
Rutherford’s discovery. Yet at the time, it elicited little immediate notice (no bloggers back then). Rutherford himself did
not fully appreciate the importance of his nucleus until Niels
Bohr showed how it explained an array of atomic mysteries.
Today a scientific discovery of such impact might get more
attention, but maybe not. Just as with Rutherford’s discovery
of the nucleus, it isn’t always obvious what a new finding’s
impact will ultimately be. In the pages of this issue you’ll
find numerous reports from science’s frontiers. Perhaps one
will someday be worthy of anniversary celebrations. Who
knows, for instance, what future impact may result from
using light to induce quantum phenomena in mechanical
devices (Page 24)? Or what insight might emerge from analyzing light’s flow through metamaterials designed to mimic
the universe emerging from the Big Bang (Page 12)? For that
matter, if anybody ever figures out why people (and animals)
yawn (Page 28), the explanation could inspire new biological insights with unimagined consequences for medicine and
maybe even evolutionary theory.
It’s unlikely, though, that even one report from a single
issue of Science News will ever have the impact of Rutherford’s
nucleus. Discoveries of that magnitude are one in a century.
—Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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