About this Item
RUTHERFORD, Ernest and H.T. Brooks. "Comparison of the Radiations from Radioactive Substances" AND Rutherford, with Frederick Soddy, "The Cause and Nature of Radioactivity: Part I" AND by Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, "The Cause and Nature of Radioactivity: Part II" in "The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science", London, Taylor and Francis, 1902, sixth series, volume IV, viii,782pp, 6 plates. Newly and very skillfully rebound in half-calf and marbled boards; raised bands, lack and red spine labels. There is some foxing in the corner of the first 30pp or so, and also to the last 20pp. The text is generally clean and bright and crisp; the binding of course is new. [++] RUTHERFORD, Ernest and H.T. Brooks. "Comparison of the radiations from Radioactive Substances" pp 1-23; AND Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, "The Cause and Nature of Radioactivity: Part I" pp 370-396; AND (by Rutherford and Frederick Soddy) "The Cause and Nature of Radioactivity: Part II" pp 569-585. [++] "By this time Rutherford had recognized the need for skilled chemical assistance in his radioactivity investigations and had secured the services of a young chemistry demonstrator at McGill, Frederick Soddy. Together they removed most of the activity from a thorium compound, calling the active matter thorium X; but they too found that the X product lost its activity and that the thorium recovered its original level in a few weeks. Had Becquerel s similar finding for uranium not been immediately at hand, they might have searched for errors in their work. In early 1902, however, they began to plot the activities as a function of time, seeing evidence of a fundamental relationship in the equality of the time for thorium X to decay to half value and thorium to double in activity. This work led directly to Rutherford s greatest achievement at McGill, for with Soddy he advanced the still-accepted explanation of radioactivity. Becquerel for several years had considered the phenomenon a form of long-lived phosphorescence, although by the first years of the twentieth century he spoke vaguely of a molecular transformation. Crookes, in the British tradition of visualized mechanical models, had suggested a modified Maxwell demon sitting on each uranium atom and extracting the excess energy from faster-moving air molecules, this energy then appearing as uranium radiation. The Curies had considered several possibilities but inclined strongly toward the concept of an unknown ethereal radiation the existence of which is manifested only through its action on the heaviest elements, which then emit alpha, beta, and gamma rays as secondary radiations. Perhaps the most prescient idea was offered by Elster and Geitel that the energy exhibited by radioactive substances comes not from external sources but from within the atoms themselves but it was left to Rutherford and Soddy to add quantitative evidence to such speculation. Their iconoclastic theory, variously called transformation, transmutation, and disintegration, first appeared in 1902 and was refined in the following year. Although alchemy had long been exorcised from scientific chemistry, they declared that radioactivity is at once an atomic phenomenon and the accompaniment of a chemical change in which new kinds of matter are produced. The radioactive atoms decay, they argued, each decay signifying the transmutation of a parent into a daughter element, and each type of atom undergoing its transformation in a characteristic period. This insight set the course for their next several years of research, for the task was then to order all the known radioelements into decay series and to search for additional members of these families."--Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, online.
Seller Inventory # ABE-1700843867530
Contact seller
Report this item
