THEORY OF RADIOACTIVITY

RUTHERFORD, E. (ERNEST) (+) FREDERICK SODDY.

The Cause and Nature of Radioactivity I (+) The Cause and Nature of Radioactivity II.

London, Taylor and Francis, 1902. 8vo. Bound in contemporary half calf with marbled boards and gilt lettering to spine. Two title labels in red and black with gilt lettering to spine and five rasied bands with gilt ornamentation. In "Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science", Sixth Series, Vol. 4, 1902. Front hinge cracked, frontboard almost detached.L Library label pasted on to pasted down front free end-paper and library stamp to verso of title page. A very fine and clean copy. Pp. 370-96; Pp. 569-585. [Entire volume: (8), 732 pp. + 6 plates.

First printing of Rutherford and Soddy's seminal paper on the nature of radioactivity, "the revolutionary theory that radio-activity is a by-product of the transmutation of one form of matter into another." (PMM 411). The theory "provided the break with the past that was clearly needed [...] In this great theory of radioactivity which these young men sprung on the learned, timid, rather unbelieving, and, as yet, unquantized world of physics of 1902 and 1903, they unabashedly but forward the idea that some atomic species are subject to spontaneous transmutation." (PAIS, Inward Bound).
They both were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work within radioactivity.

Rutherford and Soddy introduced the expression "atomic energy" in this paper, "not just for the energy released by a radioactive element, but much more generally for the energy locked in any atom" (Brown et al., Twentieth Century Physics, I, p. 63).

"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.
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." (DSB)

The volume contains several other important papers by contemporary phycicians.

Order-nr.: 47098