100 Years of Physics History Overturned at University of Manchester

July 8, 2019 — By Steven B. Krivit —

Eighth in a Series on the Rutherford Nitrogen-to-Oxygen Transmutation Myth

When Robin Marshall, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Manchester, learned of my work to correct the historical record of an experiment performed a century ago by Ernest Rutherford, he didn’t take the news well.

Marshall insisted that there was no “justification to strip Rutherford of his transmutation discovery.” In the days preceding the June 8 “Centenary of Transmutation” meeting at the University of Manchester, Marshall took to Twitter to express himself. Here are some samples:

I absolutely love it when the intellectually vacuous try to take me on. They end up not only wishing they’d never been born, they end up wishing their mother and father had never been born.

Imagine a climate denier, flat Earth, 6,000yo Earth vaccine denier rolled into one. He is called Dr. K. and he has just scatter-gun blasted the whole Manchester Uni senior hierarchy; president, deans, and hangers-on like me. We must cancel the Centenary of Transmutation conference 08062019.

[I was] asked to give a sound bite to a reporter on the Yankee who denigrated Manchester’s transmutation centenary: “His utterances bear the same relation to physics as a barking dog does to the English language. Only the dog knows what it means.”

Marshall also went online to the Chemistry Views Web site to convince the site’s editors to reinstate Rutherford’s transmutation discovery. Marshall, after all, was a physicist:

It not possible to rewrite history a hundred years later on a whim. It was accepted by the whole community of physicists at the time that Rutherford observed transmutation of nitrogen in 1919 in Manchester. The initial state in his reaction was a helium nucleus and a nitrogen nucleus. In the final state he observed a proton and a recoil nucleus that he described with surprise that should have been nitrogen but looked like oxygen.

If that is not transmutation, I don’t know what is. … I won’t tell you what to do, you are chemists and I am a physicist, but this article of yours is a serious embarrassment. The Centenary of Transmutation will be celebrated in Manchester on the 8th of June, with prude, joy and honesty.

The editors thanked Marshall for his comment but were not swayed: “We were alerted to this by Steven B. Krivit some time ago. His conclusions were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the American Institute of Physics.”

The University of Manchester’s one-day meeting titled “Centenary of Transmutation” took place, as scheduled, on June 8. The meeting was to “celebrate the centenary of the first experiments to successfully  transmute one element into another, ” allegedly performed by Ernest Rutherford, at Manchester, reported in 1919. This transmutation claim has been one of the longest-standing myths in the history of modern physics.

Five minutes after the meeting started, members of the audience learned from Sean Freeman, the head of the School of Physics and Astronomy, that there had been no such discovery. Instead, they learned that that the historic transmutation discovery took place 94 years ago, by Patrick Blackett, at the University of Cambridge. They learned that Rutherford’s 1919 accomplishment was limited to the discovery of the proton.

The meeting had been organized by the U.K. Institute of Physics. Planning for the meeting began in August 2018 or earlier.

I found out about the meeting only three weeks before it was scheduled to take place. When I saw the program, the announcements of the meeting, and the fact that the featured speaker was John Campbell, a promoter of Rutherford’s who had been promulgating the Rutherford nitrogen-to-oxygen transmutation myth for decades, I realized the urgency of the situation.

On May 19, 2019, I wrote to the two organizers, Neil Todd and Peter Rowlands, alerting them to the fact that they were on course to hold a meeting to celebrate the wrong discovery, the wrong discoverer, the wrong university, and the wrong year.

Todd is affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of Exeter. He is a visiting professor at the University of Manchester and a member of the U.K. Institute of Physics (IoP) History of Physics Group. Rowlands is an honorary teaching fellow at the University of Liverpool and a member of the IoP History of Physics Group. After I told them that other members of the IoP History of Physics Group had confirmed my facts eight months earlier, I never heard back from the organizers. My detailed communications with them and the university officials are described in this article.

I arranged for a correspondent to attend the morning session and film the speakers. Rowlands opened the meeting with a 38-second introduction and, in that brief moment, emphatically, perhaps even a bit defiantly, asserted that the University of Manchester held the bragging rights for the first artificial nuclear transmutation.

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this celebration of the centenary of transmutation, which took place in this very department 100 years ago,” Rowlands said.

Four minutes later, Freeman contradicted Rowlands. Freeman and Campbell, the two key speakers in the morning, discussed many details about Rutherford’s achievements. Neither of them made an outright admission that the entire premise of the meeting was a mistake. Instead, they discussed the proper historical basis for the meeting: Rutherford’s 1919 discovery of the proton.

Freeman also told the audience that Blackett, at Cambridge, had shown the transmutation of nitrogen to oxygen. In each of their respective chronological narratives, when Freeman and Campbell arrived at the year 1919, they spoke accurately and precisely about Rutherford’s proton discovery. They glided silently past the advertised basis for the meeting: Rutherford’s alleged transmutation discovery at Manchester.

Their omissions did not go unnoticed. No opportunity was provided for discussion after Freeman’s talk. However, in the discussion after Campbell’s talk, the audience had a chance to resolve the incongruity between the advertised purpose of the meeting and the undisclosed revised purpose of the meeting. Nearly all the audience discussions centered on transmutation. Campbell repeatedly and accurately responded to the audience that, no, Rutherford never claimed that he had transmuted nitrogen to oxygen. In a separate document, I have performed a detailed analysis of the discussion and answered some of the audience questions that Campbell did not answer adequately.

Before the audience discussion started, however, Campbell had ended his talk with a mea culpa.

Campbell’s last slide displayed the cover of his book about Rutherford and the cover of a DVD documentary video he had made. Campbell did not have the courage to use the word transmutation, but it was obvious: People had come to hear about the “Centenary of Transmutation.” Freeman and Campbell had told them unambiguously: No such event took place at Manchester. Campbell admitted that he never carefully read Rutherford’s original scientific papers. Instead, Campbell relied on secondary sources:

A lot more detail is in there, my book and the DVD, the three-volume DVD, although the detail about this side of it, I found out much more about that since I wrote my book. I just assumed that the people writing about Rutherford who knew him were right, but then I’ve found out they never looked at the article — I assumed — records of the day, and just formed their own guesswork.

It was a teachable moment in the history of science. After two decades of claiming that Rutherford had transmuted nitrogen to oxygen, Campbell had corrected his account of history; consistent with what I had told him, and consistent with the historical facts.

Link to Partial Meeting Transcript
Link to Campbell Discussion Analysis
Video Part 1 – Peter Rowlands’ Introduction
Video Part 2 – Sean Freeman’s Presentation
Video Part 3 – Neil Todd’s Presentation (1/2) (Discussion about the Manchester buildings)
Video Part 4 – Neil Todd’s Presentation (2/2) (Discussion about the Manchester buildings)
Video Part 5 – John Campbell’s Presentation (1/2)
Video Part 6 – John Campbell’s Presentation (2/2)
Video – John Campbell’s Mea Culpa