The tone of the passage is ________________________.
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Walton and Cockcroft: the names don't carry quite the same historic resonance as Watson and Crick. Yet the most enduring work of Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft -- splitting the nucleus of the atom -- can hold its own with the discovery of DNA's structure among the turning points of 20th-century science, and now, with Brian Cathcart's ''Fly in the Cathedral,'' they even get their own ''Double Helix,'' sort of.
In that unlikely 1968 best seller, James Watson created a new kind of popular science book, one that unveils the human side of science -- the ambition, pride, ill will and possible thievery that, arguably, play as great a role in revolutionary breakthroughs as objective evaluations of empirical evidence do. Ambition, pride, ill will and possible thievery might well have played a 10role at Cambridge in 1932 -- 21 years before Watson and Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub there one lunchtime and famously crowed that they'd just discovered the secret of life -- but you wouldn't know it from the historical record. Back in the early 1930's, young university researchers in Britain were still taking direction from the last vestiges of what Cathcart calls ''the age of the gentleman scientist,'' from pillars of probity who manned their workbenches with a seemingly thorough disregard for the outside world -- the scientific equivalent of a stiff upper lip.
For Walton and Cockcroft, that pillar was Sir Ernest Rutherford. At a time when physicists had begun to challenge the prevailing model of the atom as a kind of permeable pudding filled with plum like electrons, it was Rutherford who arrived at an alternate model, one consisting almost entirely of empty space. The outermost electrons, Rutherford proposed, would define the farthest 20boundary of this near void, while a nucleus, dense enough to deflect a few incoming particles yet compact enough so that the vast majority would miss, would reside at the center like ''a gnat in the Albert Hall,'' in Rutherford's words. Or, in a popular analogy of the day, like a fly in a cathedral. In 1929 Rutherford, by then the director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, assigned Walton and Cockcroft the task of catching that fly and splitting it.
They weren't alone. Several competitors in the States were also trying to swat the nucleus, a pursuit that inaugurated not only a new theoretical era of nuclear physics, but a new technological era of ''big physics.'' The kind of equipment Walton, Cockcroft and their contemporaries had to improvise would never again fit on one gentleman's workbench. Today some particle accelerators are so vast, Cathcart writes, they ''may be seen from space.''
30Cathcart devotes much of the book to the inner workings of lab machinery, and for good reason. His two central characters were hardly colorful. Cockcroft was ''an exceptionally good listener,'' but said so little that his children had a rule ''that Daddy could not leave the dinner table until he had uttered two whole sentences,'' Cathcart reports. And while the British author C. P. Snow recounted how Cockcroft took to the streets of Cambridge announcing, ''We've split the atom. We've split the atom,'' on the day of the crucial breakthrough, the anecdote is almost certainly apocryphal. The two scientists had sworn to tell no one the secret on which their professional lives now depended. Moreover, as Snow himself noted, Cockcroft led ''a singularly modest and self-effacing life.''
The same may be said of Walton. After reuniting with a sweetheart from his Belfast school days, 40he addressed his courtship letters to his future wife ''Dear Miss Wilson'' and signed them ''Ernest Walton.''
When Walton and Cockcroft began their collaboration in 1929, they hardly knew each other, and when they split the nucleus of an atom three years later, that still seemed to be the case. Given their limitations as heroes, it's not surprising that Cathcart would devote six pages to the design of the rectifier, a dizzyingly complex piece of scientific equipment, and only one brisk paragraph to the death of Cockcroft's ''beautiful and much adored'' 2-year-old son.
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 non-specialists. When he focuses on the pursuit rather than the pursuers, he captures the considerable 50suspense 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.
But in the end, they got the credit. Einstein himself said that E = mc2 was demonstrated experimentally by Cockcroft and Walton in 1932. In 1951 they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. And thanks to Cathcart's meticulous reconstruction of their finest hour, they're now enjoying a further moment of glory. As characters, however, Walton and Cockcroft were no Watson and Crick.
They were, for better or worse, gentlemen.