The Moonshine Error

On the eleventh of September 1933, Ernest Rutherford—the man who had discovered the atomic nucleus and first split it—addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science and declared that anyone who expected practical power from the transformation of atoms was talking moonshine. His claim was not baseless. With the methods then available, harnessing atomic energy was a net energy loss: it took vastly more energy to accelerate the bombarding particles than the rare successful collisions released. Read narrowly, Rutherford was right about the present. His error was to project the present forward as if it bounded the future—to mistake the inefficiency of current methods for a permanent limit. Within twenty-four hours, by his own later account, the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd, irritated by the speech, conceived the nuclear chain reaction while waiting for a traffic light near Russell Square in London. The mechanism that made Rutherford’s dismissal obsolete was not an extrapolation