HENRYK NIEWODNICZAŃSKI AND ERNEST RUTHERFORD
By the mid-1930s, Henryk Niewodniczański had made the discovery of his lifetime, had been back from a longer scientific stay at Tübingen, got habilitated, married, and seen his son Tomek born. He felt he had to do something to broaden his scientific scope from his previous preoccupation with atomic spectroscopy and thought he could do that in a leading foreign be research center. He chose Rutherford's Cambridge.
Cambridge was really an extraordinary scientific centre, great
not only
in its own times but by today's standards as well [1]. A 1935
picture of the
Cavendish Laboratory researchers shows 38 scientists gathered
around J. J. Thomson and E. Rutherford (Fig. 1).
Niewodniczański stands at the far left end in the third row
from the bottom.
He had arrived at Cambridge as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow
the year
before, in 1934, with his wife, Irena, and their one year-old
baby, Tomek.
Rutherford suggested to Niewodniczański that he join the Mond
Laboratory.
That was a new research laboratory built close to the Cavendish
Laboratory with the funds the Royal Society had received from the well-to-do
British industrialist, the chemist L. Mond. The new laboratory was managed by
Peter Kapitza. Kapitza, since he came to England in 1921 to procure scientific
equipment for the Soviet Union, collaborated closely with Rutherford. In 1933,
Kapitza was appointed a Royal Society professor and allowed to establish a
laboratory for his own work using the money donated by Mond. Unfortunately, when
he went to Russia to attend the Mendeleeff conference in 1934, he was held back
by the Soviet authorities and could not return to England. That
was why
Niewodniczański on his arrival did not meet Kapitza in
Cambridge, even
though the two became good friends in later years. When
Rutherford became head of the Mond Laboratory after Kapitza's departure he asked
J. D. Cockcroft, who had built the laboratory together with Kapitza, to run it.
Cockcroft then proposed that two Henrys: Niewodniczański and a young American
named Henry A. Boorse, should jointly start investigating resistance of metals
in very low temperatures.
In Shoenberg's recollections Niewodniczański appears as a
very talkative gentleman, and he remembers instances when Boorse
got rather irritated with Niewodniczański gossiping too much while the liquid
helium used
in the measurements boiled away. In those days, liquid helium
was still a novelty and something too precious to be wasted !
Rutherford did not often visit the Mond Laboratory, however
Boorse does recall
one such occasion. One morning, the great Lord Rutherford popped
in the Mond Lab. Both excited, Boorse and Niewodniczański thought he would want
to learn about the results of their work, or if they had come across antything
unexpected. Yet what caught Rutherford's attention was the measurement device,
in particular the liquid helium pump, which was controlled by a solenoid
connected to a timed electric circuit. Rutherford was a devoted experimental
physicist throughout all his life!
What did Niewodniczański and Boorse busy themselves with?
Kapitza's
kingdom, the Mond Laboratory, was of course the realm of low
temperatures.
Researchers at the Kamerlingh-Onnes Laboratory in Leyden, the
Mecca of
cryogenics of the time, had measured electrical resistance of
metals in low
temperatures and noticed certain anomalies. For aluminium they
found an
unexpected increase in resistance with temperature falling below
4.2 K
Lord Rutherford communicated the study to the Royal Society,
whereupon it was published in the Proceedings
After World War II, while already in Cracow, he focused on nuclear
physics
as his mainstream effort. He plunged himself into work to build
and install
large experimental devices necessary for such research work,
especially spec-
trometers and accelerators. He created a school of young
enthusiastic co-workers and established a new research centre.
Niewodniczański's stay at Rutherford's Cambridge research
centre bore
more fruit than just the burgeoning nuclear physics research in
Cracow. His
work in Cambridge on cold neutrons helped him realize the
significance of
such neutrons, even beyond nuclear physics. As he launched new
directions
of research work in Cracow, Niewodniczanski alerted his student
Jerzy Janik
to the possibility as well as the potential significance of
using the interaction of cold neutrons with matter for research in solid state
physics. That opened up vistas of expansion into to a huge research area that
eventually gave rise to a new school, centred around Niewodniczański's disciple
Jerzy Janik, of research in condensed phase by methods employing interaction
with cold neutrons.
Rutherford's impact demonstrated itself not only in the
circumstances in which Henryk Niewodniczański initiated new areas of research.
Niewodniczański was fascinated by Rutherford, his personality, and acknowledged
him as one of his
Masters. The atmosphere at the Rutherford's laboratories was
truly extraordinary. People worked hard, with great devotion to research in
physics, yet all enjoyed an excellent and friendly atmosphere at the place.
Even Professor Niewodniczański's disciples, of whom I am one,
were able
to get a feel of that in our own scientific careers. During my
lifetime I met nine Rutherfordians, all of them the Professor's colleagues from
Cambridge. I was always received and treated by them as member of the family.
Niewodniczański
befriended many of Rutherford's disciples, who later attained
top positions in
world science. Consequently, he was able to help us - his own
disciples - to stay in the best foreign physics research centres abroad and set
up different contacts and international cooperation which has continued to bear
fruit until today.
The two passed away also in an amazingly similar manner. Both
were afflicted with hernia, and both decided to had it operated. Shortly before
he went to hospital the Professor came to our - Budzanowski's, Grotowski's and
mine -
office at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Cracow-Bronowice.
He told us he was going to the hospital and that his illness was very much like
Rutherford's. He concluded by saying to us: "Alike Rutherford, I shall not
to survive the operation." Obviously, we did not take the Professor's
pessimism seriously.
Mark Oliphant wrote in his recollections about Rutherford
In the morning of December 20, 1968, several days after his
operation,
I visited Professor Niewodniczański at the clinical hospital in
Cracow. He was already able to get up from his bed. Although he was somewhat
concerned about the blood showing up in his saliva, he otherwise was all right.
Reassured about his condition we went that night to a performance of the Cracow
"Piwnica pod Baranami" (The Cellar under the Rams) cabaret at the Physics Institute of the Jagiellonian
University. When it ended, as we were leaving I noticed Mrs. Irena
Niewodniczańska in the hall.
Fig. 1. Scientific Staff of the Cavendish Laboratory in June 1935.
Niewodniczański is standing on the far left in the third row.
And those in the picture were not all the researchers. I knew
personally three
Rutherford’s co-workers not shown in this picture who, I am
sure, were at
Cavendish at that time. And then there was also the Mond
Laboratory. Apart
from Thomson and Rutherford, among those shown in the picture
there are three other Nobel Prize winners in Physics.
Fig. 2. H. Niewodniczański, H. A. Boorse and C. J. Milner
in front of the Mond Laboratory. (Photo D. Shoenberg)
In a photo (Fig. 2) I received
by courtesy of Professor David Shoenberg, Niewodniczański is
seen sitting beside A. H. Boorse and C. J. Milner. That was not the complete
Mond Lab, for there was also David Shoenberg, yet he was the one who took this
picture. Niewodniczański
(Fig. 3) took pictures too; unfortunately those photos were
burned in Wilno during the war.
Fig. 3. H. Niewodniczański. (Photo. D. Shoenberg)
The third picture I received from David Shoenberg (Fig. 4) shows
Mrs. Irena Niewodniczańska, in Shoenberg's words "the charming wife of
Niewodniczanski", with the little Tomek, punted by Shoenberg down the River
Cam.
Fig. 4. Irena Niewodniczańska with her son Thomas in a punt on
the River Cam
(Photo. D. Shoenberg)
I was able to get in touch with many former colleagues of
Professor Niewodniczański of his Cambridge days: Professors David Shoenberg in
Cambridge, Bill Burcham in Birmingham, Maurice Goldhaber in Brookhaven National
Laboratory [2], and Henry Boorse in Houston, Texas.
Fig. 5. Front page of the Boorse and Niewodniczański paper.
Rutherford suggested to Niewodniczański that he move his
research
work to the Cavendish Laboratory. That was a short time after
Chadwick's
1932 discovery of neutron at this Laboratory [7]. Neutrons,
particles with no
electric charge, are excellent projectiles to initiate nuclear
reactions. Enrico
Fermi with his ragazzi di Via Panisperna in Rome, Amaldi,
D'Agostino,
Pontecorvo, Rasetti and Segré, observed in their famous study
[8] that efficiency of neutrons in producing nuclear transformations increased
in the
presence of large quantities of paraffin or water. They
attributed it to a
loss of neutron energy as a result of repeated collisions with
protons, i.e. the
nuclei of hydrogen atoms. The number of such collisions was not
known
at the time, but T. Bjerge and C. H. Westcott [9] raised reasons
for believing
the collisions could reduce neutron velocities to the gas
kinetic velocity
corresponding to the temperature of the scattering hydrogenous
body. That
brought up the idea to study the neutron slow-down factor as a
function of
temperature. Fermi had been unable to detect any change in this
factor between room temperature and 200 °C, however such effects were likely to
appear as temperature was being lowered. Wetscott and Niewodniczański decided
to attempt measurements at temperatures of liquid nitrogen (77 K) and liquid
hydrogen (20 K). Using the radioactivity induced by neutrons in
several
substances (copper, silver, rhodium) as a detector, and also
studying neutron
absorption coefficient for the same substances (copper and
silver), they tested
the influence on those effects of the temperature of a paraffin
block wherein
the neutrons were slowed down. For liquid hydrogen temperature
they found
a substantial increase in absorption coefficient as compared to
that at liquid nitrogen temperature. The effect on the induced radioactivity was
less pronounced because of the effect of neutron absorption in the paraffin
block.
Measurements were also done using a boron chamber to detect
neutrons and
substituting liquid hydrogen for paraffin as the slow-down
medium. Results
of this study were presented by M. L. Oliphant, who supervised
it directly,
and published in The Proceedings of the Cambridge
Philosophical Society [10] (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6. Front page of the Wescott and Niewodniczański paper.
The Cambridge stay at Rutherford's Lab and the work he did there
marked a breakthrough in Henryk Niewodniczański's scientific
career.
Above all, these opened to him a new perspective on nuclear
physics, a new
domain of physics that was grwing very fast at that time. Upon
his return to Wilno, and immediately after receiving a grant from Poland's
National Heritage Fund, Niewodniczański committed himself to creating a nuclear
physics laboratory. But the war broke in September 1939.
Fig. 7. Professor Henryk Niewodniczański in his office
at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Cracow, Poland, the 1960s.
(Photo from the Archives of the Henryk Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics in Cracow.)
Professor Niewodniczański, inspired the excellent atmosphere
of dedication to work and friendship in all the research centres he headed. In
fact, among Polish scientific research centres, Cracow has gained a proud
reputation of being a place with an excellent scientific climate. And it
continues to this day, 34 years after Professor's death.
Professor Niewodniczański's countenance had a striking if not
extraordinary resemblance to Rutherford's own (Fig. 7). Niewodniczański
deliberately
strengthened this impression by his hairstyle, the way he
trimmed his moustache, and his tweed jackets.
Fig. 8. Henryk Niewodniczański and Sir Ernest Rutherford Lord
Nelson.
At a Jubilee Conference in Manchester in 1960 to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of Rutherford's
discovery of the atomic nucleus, at a concert I was sitting beside Professor
Niewodniczański. Several rows below us another Rutherfordian, Professor Rudolph
Peierls and his wife Nina were sitting. Years later, after Professor
Niewodniczański’s death, Mrs. Peierls told me that her most shocking
experience at that jubilee function occurred when she turned to look around and
she noticed... Rutherford in person sitting a couple of rows above her.
- "Adam, Henryk is dead", she said in tears.
In the volume of Acta Physica Polonica dedicated to the
memory of Professor Niewodniczański, our friend and scientific partner at
Oxford, Dr. Peter E. Hodgson wrote in his Personal Appreciation [12]:
"On the wall of his office in Cracow there was a picture of
the young Niewodniczański in the company of Rutherford in Cambridge. We
in England who know what he did to establish nuclear physics in Poland naturally
think of him as the Rutherford of Poland. His work for nuclear physics was in a
heroic scale and will endure into the future, but we will remember him first of
all as a kindly and benevolent person."
I am sure no other words could be appreciated more by our Professor.
* * *
I wish to thank wholeheartedly Professor Niewodniczański's
colleagues from the
period of his work at the Cavendish Laboratory: Professors W. E.
Burcham,
H. A. Boorse, D Shoenberg and M. Goldhaber for sharing their
recollections with me, and in addition Professor D. Shoenberg for sending me the
photographs. My special thanks are due to Dr. P. E. Hodgson of the University of
Oxford and to Dr. G. I. Squires of the Cavendish Laboratory for their assistance
in collecting the information on the Rutherford times in Cambridge.
Copyright © 1997-200