Science in Ireland is not something that gets much coverage compared to the Arts that fill much of the Daily News papers and get supplements in the papers every week. Some people would put this down to Ireland not being a big science nation while being the nation of Joyce, Heaney and Yeats we seen as an Artistic powerhouse. Yet on science we certainly are not lacking in big names.

So where to start. A good place to start this series is probably with E=mc^2 the most recognised equation in the world. Published by Einstein in 1905 in his paper “Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content”? It has entered pop culture like nothing else in science. Now before anyone asks Einstein was not Irish. What Einstein published was a theory a mathematical model it was not until 1927 that it was actually experimentally proved by John Douglas Cockcroft from England and Ernest Walton from Waterford. What they did achieved was the first artificial splitting of an Atom.

In their lab in the Cavendish laboratory they built a particle accelerator (below rightpic from here). A particle accelerator is a device that as the name suggests accelerates particles to high speed. These then are used to bombard other particles to split them open. The largest one ever is the soon to be switched on The Large Hadron Collider in Cern

Using this accelerator they bombarded a lithium nucleus with a stream of protons using a high potential difference around 700,000V to do so. The result two helium nuclei and energy of around 17Mev. This was the first splitting of an atom. And resulted in 4 major scientific breakthroughs

First it proved E=mc^2. E=mc^2 means that mass has energy and energy has mass. Now an Atom has a certain mass and also has energy holding the atom together. Max Plank postulated that if an atom could be broken apart the binding energy would be released then the weight would be less then the constituent parts. The result of the Walton Cockcroft experiment proved this was true.

But that is not the only triumph of this experiment. It pretty much started a new branch of physics where particles are use to initiate nuclear interactions in a controlled way. Which CERN is now the world leader.

The apparatus allowed the creation of positron beams far more useful to experiment with then Aplha Particles from decay nuclei used before.

Quantum Tunneling is an effect in Quantum Physics which wikipedia explains clearer then I could.

In quantum mechanics, quantum tunneling is a micro nanoscopic phenomenon in which a particle violates the principles of classical mechanics by penetrating or passing through a potential barrier or impedance higher than the kinetic energy of the particle.^[1] A barrier, in terms of quantum tunnelling, may be a form of energy state analogous to a “hill” or incline in classical mechanics, which classically suggests that passage through or over such a barrier would be impossible without sufficient energy.

The main guy behind this was a Russian by the name of George Gamow. Classically Walton and Cockcroft should not have been able to split the atom and the energy they were using. It simply should not have happened. Classically the energy needed to “blast” through the wall was far greater then they were using. The repulsive forces should have been to great. But they did it. Because they didn’t blast through the wall they tunnelled. They proved Quantum Tunnelling.

In 1934 he became a fellow at Trinity College Dublin. During the war he was asked to go to America to join a group of scientists in “war work”. Which later became known as the Manhattan Project the building of the Atomic bomb. He didn’t take up the offer as the university did not have the staff to cover him. He also worked on various projects to help with Ireland during the war on projects like dealing with energy shortages.

In 1951 Walton and Cockcroft won the Nobel Prize for physics the only Irish person to win the award for physics.

He spent much of his life pushing the cause of science education in Ireland. In 1957 he wrote to the government saying.

“We are today entering a new scientific era and, if we are to benefit from it, our people should not be allowed to grow up scientifically illiterate.”

He continued on in Ireland even though funding for the sciences was poor. He died in 1995. The Walton Causeway Park in Dungarvan is named after him as is buildings in Waterford IT and Methodist College, Belfast.

Hear an audio clip of a speech he gave about the day he split the atom on Trinty’s Website.

Biography here