The Restless Atom: The Awakening of Nuclear Physics

by Alfred Romer

Science. First edition stated. Tan cloth covers rubbed and lightly soiled, spine edns bumped. Interior clean and tight, endpapers tanned, pages toned.

Genres: Physics, Nonfiction

198 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1982

Reviews

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is a history of the early work with atoms – the experiments that built upon each other, probing ever deeper into the then (late 1800s, early 1900s) barely known world of the atoms (1) and, specifically, those elements that self-transformed into other elements via “emanation” (“the power to give out rays from some unknown source of stored-up energy”) in what came to be known as radioactive decay, at a fixed, standardized rate. (2) The book’s emphasis is on technical detail, including the early history of the periodic table (3), with many well-done diagrams to illustrate the various experiments.

(1) “Atomic physics,” Romer writes, “would begin where we have ended [with this book], with the first successes of Rutherford and Bohr’s atomic model. What we have been following here was all preparation for that.”

(2) The book also notes that it was realized at that time that “stable atoms contained…their store of locked-in energy”

(3) “Bohr proposed to give each atom its quota of electrons by numbering the elements in order as they lay in the Periodic Table, and letting the order-number of each element be the number of electrons in its atom….The nucleus carried nearly all the mass of the atom, but it was unimaginably small, and that make it unimaginably remote from the atom’s outermost parts. As Bohr pointed out, it would be these other parts which gave an atom its chemical behavior or the particular pattern of its spectrum.”

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is well-written, although it is difficult to understand. It tells how various scientists captured the concepts about atoms through experimentation. I liked the list of how each element got its name, at the end.