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| Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons |
On 25th June, 1995, Ernest Walton, our only Nobel laureate for physics died in Belfast at the age of 91. Together with his colleague John Cockcroft, they built one of the first particle accelerators at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the 1930s. This ultimately led to what's generally known as "splitting the atom". For this work, he was awarded along with Cockcroft a Nobel Prize in 1951.
Walton came to visit us in DIT, Kevin Street in Dublin when I was a student there in the mid 80s, and gave a lecture during which he spoke about his work in Cambridge. He appeared to be a mild mannered and unassuming man. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know who he was at the time. It was in an era before the Internet and our education system was hardly informative either. History books told us about the figures involved in revolution and the struggle for independence, but shamefully left out Walton, Hamilton and others involved in scientific discovery. I wish I could remember the content of Walton's lecture. I vaguely remember him talking about Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand scientist who was also a pioneering researcher in the field of nuclear physics and radioactivity from the end of the 19th century onwards. Rutherford apparently had a larger than life personality and Cockcroft and Walton, his research students, used to wind him up.