The Ghost of Matter Read online

  Martha brought her hand down again to the keys before her, an automatic motion almost, and her ring was bright against the black and white keys. Bright gold, for marriage and children and bringing together. Gold that was now for breaking apart, for fragments and family shattering.

  She rested her hand on the keys and did not play. When Ernest left, Martha set her hand back in her lap, clasped together neatly with the other and waited with a straight back for news that would never come, for children that would never be found.

  IT WAS QUITE THE MOST incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. On consideration, I realized that this scattering backward must be the result of a single collision, and when I made calculations I saw that it was impossible to get anything of that order of magnitude unless you took a system in which the greater part of the mass of the atom was concentrated in a minute nucleus. It was then that I had the idea of an atom with a minute massive centre, carrying a charge. (Ernest Rutherford, on the gold foil experiment.)

  MANCHESTER, 1909

  THE GOLD WAS BEATEN very thin, into leaf. It shimmered even as the room went dark around it, shimmered like the sea surface under sunset and Ernest held his breath, hoped for the absence of salt.

  It was dark in the laboratory cellar, with pipes above and below. Whenever he heard voices on the stair, at the door, he’d have to warn them to duck their heads for the hot-water pipe, to take care when stepping over the other two water pipes just beyond. If they slipped in puddles and injured themselves, the experiment would have to be put off while they patched themselves up. Then the readjustment would have to start all over again, for it took half an hour in the dark to be able to see the scintillations, to not miss their presence with eyes too used to light. The worst of it was if they slipped, Ernest couldn’t even be certain what it was they’d slipped in. The puddles might have come from leaky pipes, but he’d gone over them all himself and never found a single leak. Those puddles that appeared in the dark, smelling of salt, would magically vanish when the lights turned on. It made the cellar floor untrustworthy.

  Ernest was so careful, stepping down there himself. His knee had never been the same since those first days in London, when he’d fallen and damaged it. On a banana skin, too, and that made it worse. Such a ridiculous accident. He didn’t quite trust it to hold him if he skidded in water, if one leg shot out from under him and bent awkwardly. He always watched out for water, and the presence of gold always reminded him.

  ‘Half an hour, lads,’ he said. Adjusting to the darkness enough to see the scintillations, the scattered particles, could be tedious, a forced delay but a necessary one in a method that strained sight and patience both. They worked in relays, searching by turns and in single minutes for particles that wandered off-track, that rebounded in directions they were not supposed to go.

  Ernest hunched over the microscope, blind and squeezed into position. He had to move slowly – they all did – to avoid stumbling, to keep the experiment from knocking over. He was looking for the little flashes that indicated radioactive particles shot through the leaf had hit the target: a phosphorescent plate, painted with zinc sulphide. Radon particles that by all rights should have hit dead on, like a boat headed straight for home.

  The line wasn’t straight. Instead, a fuzziness, as if the particles had lost their way, and Ernest ordered the experiment reconfigured to search further, to see if the scattering was wider than they thought.

  ‘Do you see that?’ said Geiger, said Marsden, pressed up against him like brothers and the three of them crammed together in a little space and wondering. ‘I think some of them are coming back.’

  One in eight thousand, they were: the little particles that hit the gold foil and rebounded back to where they came, as if returning to the source. Some scattered off to the sides, as much as ninety degrees off, but for Ernest it was the rebounders that caught him about the throat, that made his eyes squint and smart in the dark.

  (Sitting in the church with Martha, with his father and his brothers and sisters, those that remained, sitting in front of an empty space where the coffins would be if they’d ever found bodies to put in them, listening to the priest talk as gently as he could of souls returned to God, and watching his mother twist a loose ring on fingers grown thin from grief.)

  ‘Professor!’ said Geiger (said Marsden and Charlie and Herbert). ‘Do you see that?’

  ‘I see it,’ said Ernest, of the strange, hard scatter that could only come if the foil was solid somehow and at the same time not, as if the gold united and fragmented at once. ‘I see it!’ he said again, and the thrill in his voice was from more than science, more than scatter – for while there had been no puddles on the floor, no salt water and no scent, the sight of scattering had come with a cold small hand, brief and damp on the back of his neck.

  ‘Don’t jump,’ said Geiger, laughing. ‘You don’t want to tip it all over.’

  ‘I’ll jump if I want to,’ said Ernest, quick and gruff and absolutely prepared to have his chilly, goose-bump flesh excused by a more tangible mystery, by results and equipment he could reach out and touch.

  ‘They’re punching through,’ said Marsden, and his breath in the dark was excited, as if he had run a race and come home first. ‘Most of them, anyway.’

  HAVELOCK, 1886

  ‘I’M SORRY,’ SAID ERN. ‘Do I know you?’

  It was a small settlement, where they lived on the Sound. Ern couldn’t say that he was on close terms with everyone, but he knew most of them by sight and this was a woman he’d never seen before. She didn’t look local either, what with her light slipper shoes so unsuitable for coastal walking, but there was something about her – the turn of her head, perhaps, or the way that she watched him – that made Ern think that he knew her.

  It was the colour of her dress that struck him the most, though Ern had never had an interest in fashion, had never paid much notice to what his sisters wore. This dress was different. The deep bright blue of it, so vivid in the afternoon it almost hurt him to look at it... It was the blue of the Sounds under sunlight, the colour of the water when the light hit the waves just right, just before the shallows turned deep and the surface was sheer and sharp and reflective. It was too ostentatious a colour for a day dress, Ern thought, at least in Havelock. Even without an eye for style he knew it would be noticed, would be seen as forward. Inappropriate. Not a dress for doing in; too fine for kitchen work and liable to show the dirt.

  Her back was to the sun. Her hair was haloed against it, her face a little fuzzy, fraying around the edges. It made it hard to look at her without squinting and screwing his face up. Ern didn’t want to be rude, to make her think he was pulling faces at her. He was too tired for horseplay, had too much of worry about him to joke on a deserted beach in Marlborough while he looked for his brothers (looked for their bodies) in old clothes and without his books, his boots damp with sand and soil and heavy on his feet.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Have you seen my father? James Rutherford, he is, about so tall. He should have some men with him.’ Their neighbours, their friends, the village acquaintances come out to search with him, to look for boys who could have been their own. There’d been women in the first searches too, the Rutherford house being too small for all those who had come to comfort his mother – but none were impractical enough to wear dresses like this for searching, and certainly none would have been tactless enough to wear a dress the colour of celebration, the colour of happiness and sunlight on the waters those boys might have (must have?) drowned in.

  ‘Ma’am?’ he said again, but the girl just stared at him, silent. Ern felt his temper slipping and bit his tongue so he wouldn’t explode at her, rail against bad manners – but though hers were inexcusable, it wouldn’t really be her he was screaming at. Grief hadn’t submerged all his sense of fairness yet. He couldn’t help but think her
foolish, yet there was nothing of malice in her expression. Just distance, like the far-off sound of sea gulls, like the moment of silence that he imagined must surely take place in laboratories, while the experimenters watched and waited for their results.

  Still, it was difficult not to sound clipped as he bade her good day and moved on, in the direction he believed the search party had taken. Ern didn’t know why he looked back. The girl made no sound. She didn’t call out for him to stop, didn’t cry for his attention. There were no thin footsteps on the beach behind him, their weight muted by sand and shuffling. There was no reason for him to look back – and yet he did, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling, rising, and the sense of familiarity coming over him again as a wave.

  The girl was staring at him. At him, with none of the distance or absence of her earlier self, and one of her arms was stretched out parallel to the ground. She pointed in the direction he would have gone and Ern felt himself step back, just ever so slightly, for even though he was a big lad there was something in her that gave him goose bumps, that both underlined the feeling that he knew her and reinforced the distance between them. She stared at him, unmoving, and her outstretched arm didn’t waver or dip. She was still as iron, still as statues if statues had sleeves that gleamed at the edges, if they wore dresses that frayed around a figure and let the light through.

  ‘I’m seeing things,’ he said, eyes screwed up and they were so heavy in his head that what he saw had to be a result of exhaustion, of poor sleep and hallucination. Yet when Ern opened his eyes again the girl was still there, still pointing ... and so he turned, quickly, unwilling to turn his back on her but compelled to follow the sightline of those insubstantial fingers—

  And there was his father, returning from the day’s search, stooped and stubborn in the distance. There were fewer people around him than there had been last month, and more would fall away over the coming weeks, Ern knew, if they didn’t find what most of them must suspect by now that they would never find. Still, he was grateful for their presence, their support, and not only for Herbert’s sake, and Charles’. Not only for his father’s. Ern had always known what to say to him before but now the silences between them were uncomfortable, full of things that Ern didn’t know how to say and James didn’t know how to hear.

  When he looked back, the girl was gone. The sands were empty, and held no trace of passage.

  WHILE THE OVERALL EFFICIENCY of the process rises with increase of energy of the bombarding particle, there seems to be little hope of gaining useful energy from atoms by such methods. On the other hand, the recent discovery of the neutron and the proof of its extraordinary effectiveness in producing transformations at very low velocities opens up new possibilities, if only a method could be found of producing slow neutrons in quantity with little expenditure of energy. At the moment, however, the natural radioactive bodies are the only known source for generating energy from atomic nuclei, but this is on far too small a scale to be useful for technical purposes. (Ernest Rutherford, Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, November 1936.)

  CAMBRIDGE, 1932

  ERNEST KNEW HIS STRENGTHS. Patience wasn’t one of them, nor stillness, nor silence. And with his bad knee, cramming himself into the tea-chest hut in the lab was becoming ever more embarrassing. He’d been able to manage it well enough once, with Geiger and Marsden, when youth had somewhat compensated for bulk, but Ernest had always been a big man and compressing himself into small spaces was difficult.

  Now, decades later, Cockcroft and Walton were making allowances for him. There was something they wanted him to see, scintillations from the new experiment, and they were so determined he wouldn’t stumble that they actually shut the machines off before they’d allow him to stump across the laboratory floor and into the hut. Ernest knew he was developing a reputation for clumsiness, knew the equipment in the workroom was expensive and often fragile, but still ... it was humiliating to be so couched in care.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said, aware that irritation was clouding his tone and trying to hide it. ‘I’m ready. Get on with it now, I can’t stay like this forever.’ And he’d only been there moments, really, but already he could feel his knee stiffening, feel the coming on of headaches because he’d never had patience for this sort of thing, the squinting at scintillations, and his eyesight was less than it had been.

  ‘I’m getting too old for this,’ he grumbled.

  ‘I’m sorry, Professor, what was that?’ said Walton from outside the hut, waiting on him, on his pronouncement.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Ernest. ‘Nothing.’ Just talking to himself, that was it. God, but he was getting old. Not that he’d ever admit it, but he could see the reactions, the sympathy from others. It had started from Eileen’s death, the idea that he was something to be careful with. Not so much from Cockcroft, who had lost a lad of his own not much before Ernest had lost Eileen – and Cockcroft’s boy had been little more than a baby, a chubby-cheeked, chubby-legged young thing who Ernest had seen running about at full-tilt...

  He had that to be grateful for, at least. He’d had decades with his daughter, and there were grandchildren now to remind him of her, to keep her alive in the turn of their heads, the lines of their mouths and cheeks.

  Something hit the side of the little wooden hut then, hit quick and sharply, as if it were knocking. ‘What’s the problem?’ he said, his voice loud in the confines of the chest, of the laboratory. Not for nothing had signs been put around the Cavendish encouraging people to speak softly, lest they upset delicate equipment. Ernest knew by ‘people’ they meant him, but he had never been one for quiet. ‘Why are you rattling at me? Has that damn contraption gone off again?’

  ‘There’s no problem, Professor,’ said Walton, and though Ernest couldn’t see his face there was puzzlement in his tone. ‘Can’t you see them?’

  ‘Of course I can see them!’ said Ernest, withering. His eyesight might not be as sharp as a younger man’s but he could still make out the little flashes, the bright scintillations. ‘Why are you rapping on the hut?’

  There was a small silence. ‘We’re not,’ said Cockcroft. ‘Professor, are you all right?’

  Ernest stared at the scintillations, pursing his lips. And it happened again, on the wood just beside his head, as if someone were pressed up against the box behind him, their fist just two inches from his head.

  ‘Professor?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I must have knocked something myself. Easy enough to do, crammed in here.’ And for once the reputation he had for quick temper and easy explosion was a useful thing, for the other men made no mention and went on as before.

  The knocking continued. Fast and slow, erratic as far as he could tell – if there was a pattern behind it then Ernest could not fathom it. There were moments when he thought it had gone entirely, before an especially loud knock dragged his attention back, dragged it away from scintillations and science. He didn’t let on, of course, but there was room for his attention to be divided. Ernest knew what he was seeing. He’d known from the first moment. Those scintillations were alpha particles, the result of an experiment to see lithium disintegrate, to see its atom split down into parts. Ernest would be ten years in his grave before he couldn’t identify an alpha particle scintillation. He’d been there at their birth – or the birth of their discovery, at least. He knew those scintillations better than any man living or dead.

  Yet he was an experimentalist at heart and it was an automatic reaction for him to tinker, to hunt down and modify and adjust. It was a skill that served him well – and with the tea chest and the lithium and the knocking, it served him twice. For the knocking had itself disintegrated, had tuned and simplified down to the final form, and it was a form that he recognised. A child’s knocking game, a simple signalling rhythm that he had played with Charles and Herbert, that he had taught to Eileen.

  The gruff instructions to change the current, to alter the voltage – there was nec
essity to them, and science. But they were also an excuse to stay within the hut, to keep staring at scintillations that he couldn’t see any longer because his eyes were full of salt water. It kept his face turned away, from Walton who would have felt pity for him and Cockcroft who would have understood.

  Ernest stayed in the little cramped hut until he couldn’t hear the knocking any more. When his eyes were dry he inched himself out into the comparative space of the laboratory, stiff and straining and with his knee screaming from confinement, and the success was bittersweet; for he knew more of splitting, he thought, than anyone alive.

  HAVELOCK, 1887

  ‘DAD,’ SAID ERN. ‘DAD.’ It was a hopeless bid for attention, he knew, the words too short and blunt to have any effect, to penetrate the callus that had grown up over the open wound of loss. It was the only thing that he could think to say that didn’t have cruelty in its bones, that wasn’t sharp and terrible and indistinguishable from kindness. What else was there to say? He’d tried talking of rugby, of his school work, of the gossip he’d heard down at the local store when his mother had sent him down there to get supplies. It all sloughed off, as if magnetic: the poles of his father’s misery in opposition to his own, the one directed inside, the other able to step back a little, to look outside himself.

  ‘Dad,’ Ern wanted to say. ‘It’s been a year. They’re gone. Dead. They drowned and they’re gone. You’re not going to find them.’ It was the cruellest he’d ever felt. Ern knew he had a temper, knew that it exploded sometimes into snapping and hard jabs but he cooled quickly, apologised easily and without sulking. This deliberate, considered infliction of pain was another thing entirely, especially when James was so pained already. His father had always been a strong man, fit from years of physical labour in a frontier environment, but the past year had thinned him further, had left him sinewy and stone-mouthed and with an expression so whippet-thin that Ern could hardly bear to look at him. There were times that he looked at his father and James would appear so old. Fragile, almost, and Ern had always felt able to go to him before but the gulf between them was widening and he didn’t know how to bridge it.