Rutherford Promoter Retracts Nitrogen-to-Oxygen Transmutation Claim

June 4, 2019 — By Steven B. Krivit —

Fourth in a Series of Articles on the Rutherford Nitrogen-to-Oxygen Transmutation Myth

New Zealander John Campbell, a promoter of New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), has agreed to stop asserting that Rutherford was the world’s first person to transmute elements by changing nitrogen into oxygen. The Rutherford transmutation claim has been one of the longest-standing myths in the history of modern physics. Campbell had been a leading proponent of the myth.

For decades, Campbell has also asserted that, because Rutherford made the nitrogen-to-oxygen transmutation discovery, Rutherford was the “world’s first successful alchemist.”

Excerpt from Campbell’s June 13, 2018, presentation at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

After New Energy Times advised Campbell on May 15, 2019, that the discovery of artificial transmutation belonged instead to Rutherford’s British research fellow Patrick Blackett, Campbell conceded his mistake. However, in the same sentence, Campbell also began to assert that Rutherford was still the first person to achieve an artificial transmutation because “he turned nitrogen into hydrogen.”

“In the future, I will be more careful and not summarize it as that he turned nitrogen into oxygen but use what was known in 1919, that he turned nitrogen into hydrogen,” Campbell wrote.

In fact, within a year of his 1919 experiment, Rutherford knew that what he had called a “hydrogen atom” was not the element hydrogen but in fact a subatomic, constituent particle of hydrogen; he named it the “proton.” Thus, Rutherford could not accurately claim that he had transmuted one element to another, which is modern alchemy.

On June 3, 2019, in an article published in Physics World, Campbell discussed Rutherford’s 1919 research and, for the first time in two decades, did not assert that Rutherford had transmuted nitrogen to oxygen. Instead, Campbell replaced oxygen with hydrogen. Campbell also wrote that Rutherford was the first person to “split the atom” — language that suggests that Rutherford also may have discovered nuclear fission:

[Rutherford] had become the first person to split the atom, induce a nuclear reaction and be a successful alchemist. Rutherford had shown, for the first time, that protons were constituents of nitrogen and that he had changed nitrogen into hydrogen.

The diagram below displays what Rutherford knew and had reported in his 1919 papers.

Therefore, Campbell’s new transmutation assertion — that Rutherford “turned nitrogen into hydrogen” — is inaccurate. Campbell will be the main speaker this Saturday at a one-day meeting at the University of Manchester titled “Centenary of Transmutation,” where he is scheduled to talk about Rutherford.