CarnotCycle is a thermodynamics blog but occasionally its enthusiasm spills over into other subjects, as is the case here.
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When one considers the great achievements in radioactivity research made at the start of the 20th century by Ernest Rutherford and his team at the Victoria University, Manchester it seems surprising how little progress they made in finding an answer to the question posed above.
They knew that radioactivity was unaffected by any agency applied to it (even temperatures as low as 20K), and since the radioactive decay law discovered in 1902 by Rutherford and Soddy was an exponential function associated with probabilistic behavior, it was reasonable to think that radioactivity might be a random process. Egon von Schweidler’s work pointed firmly in this direction, and the Geiger-Nuttall relation, formulated by Hans Geiger and John Nuttall at the Manchester laboratory in 1911 and reformulated in 1912 by Richard Swinne in Germany, laid a mathematical foundation on which to construct ideas. Yet despite these pointers, Rutherford wrote in 1912 that “it is difficult to offer any explanation of the causes operating which lead to the ultimate disintegration of the atom”. (more…)
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