In the early 19th century, Paley’s book Natural Theology, arguing that all of “creation” argued for the evidence of a divine designer, became the key text for those who saw the hand of god in the marvels of nature.
Within a very short time, Robert Oppenheimer, another of Rutherford’s Cavendish protégés, was watching the first nuclear detonation, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and murmuring to himself a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death: the shatterer of worlds.”Ĭontinuing our stroll-or pub crawl-we might pass Christ’s College, alma mater of the Reverend William Paley.
It’s not exactly a footnote to add Sir Mark Oliphant, who pioneered the deployment of microwave radar and flew to the United States during the war to assist American scientists in their pursuit of the non-peaceful implications of Cavendish’s split atom and the setup that would become the Manhattan Project. This was during the exceptional directorship of Professor Ernest Rutherford, under whose benign and brilliant rule work at the Cavendish also garnered Nobels for Sir James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron and Sir Edward Appleton’s demonstration of the existence of a layer of the ionosphere that could reliably transmit radio waves. But a grand total of 29 Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work done in this unassuming building, perhaps the best known being to Sir John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton for the development of the first nuclear particle accelerator (which allowed them to be the first to split the atom without using radioactive material), in 1932. You could easily miss it: its quaint lack of space and resources, its generally shoestring and amateur character are lovingly satirized in Penelope Fitzgerald’s lovely novel The Gate of Angels.
#Isaac newton virgin free#
You could take a walk in the town, for example, and pass the Cavendish Laboratory on Free School Lane. © National Trust Photographic Library/Derrick E.
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