Trechos de Recollections And Reflections (1936), de Joseph John Thomson.
The work I did in connection with the war was mainly in association with the Board of Invention and Research (B.I.R.). This Board was instituted in July 1915 when Mr Arthur Balfour was First Lord, for the purpose of giving the Admiralty expert assistance in organising and encouraging scientific effort in connection with the requirements of the Naval Service.
- - -
The most urgent need of the Admiralty at the time the B.I.R. was instituted was some method of detecting submarines, and means were taken at once to start experiments with this subject. The most obvious method of detecting a submarine is by the sound it makes. It had long been known that sound travels well through water, and various methods had been devised for detecting it. Thus, if a tube is closed at one end with a diaphragm and lowered into water through which sounds are passing, the diaphragm will be thrown into vibration and produce in the air in the tube sound waves of the same pitch as those in the water. These can easily be detected by the ear or by a microphone. The problem of detecting a moving submarine by the sound it makes is a most difficult and complicated one. In the first place, the vessel which is hunting the submarine itself produces noises when it is not at rest, by its engines, its motion through the water, and so on. In bad weather these drown all others. Thus a microphone submerged in the water and carried along by a ship will give tongue even when there are no submarines in the neighbourhood.
- - -
[...] any resonance effect will destroy the quality of the noise of the submarine and make it more difficult to detect. It would be much easier than it is to detect a submarine, if it were a musical instrument and gave out a definite note. Even if we can identify a noise as due to a submarine we require, if we are to catch it, to know the direction from which it comes. The velocity of sound through water is about 4-3 times that through air. This will be the proportion between the wave-length in water and air respectively. An opaque object placed in the way of a wave will not cast a definite shadow unless the diameter of the object is many times the wave-length. Thus if we determine the direction of the sound in water by placing an object in its way and finding where the shadow is, we have to use much larger objects than would be necessary in air.
The B.I.R. began their attack on the detection of submarines by obtaining from Sir Ernest Rutherford a report on the various methods which had been employed, or suggested, for detecting sounds in water. He reported that the microphone method was by far the most promising.
- - -
The Submarine Committee of the B.I.R., after a visit to Hawkcraig in September 1916, reported that conditions were unsatisfactory. One cause of this was that the Navy was then divided into two parties, Fisherites and Anti-Fisherites, and that every scheme associated in any way with Lord Fisher was regarded by the latter party with grave suspicion and dislike. There was so much prejudice of this kind that I believe B.I.R. was said by the Anti-Fisher party to stand for Board of Intrigue and Revenge. Towards the end of 1916 it was decided to transfer the work of the B.I.R. on submarines from Hawkcraig to Harwich, and a laboratory was built at Parkeston Quay. This change improved matters, but it had involved a loss of several months just at the time when a detector had been devised which, as far as could be tested by experiments on a small scale, promised to be of service in detecting submarines. It was essential that it should be tested by fitting the apparatus to some vessels in the Fleet and seeing how it behaved under service conditions. It was only to be expected that under these conditions defects would be detected which would require further experiments at the Experimental Station to overcome. If it had not been for the delays just mentioned, efficient submarine detectors would have been available months earlier than they were and much loss of life prevented.
- - -
Professor Langevin, whom I am proud to be able to say is an old pupil of mine, discovered, when working in France at the detection of submarines, a method by which oscillations could be produced in plates of quartz, so rapid that their wave-lengths were small compared with the size of the plate, and which allowed a great amount of energy to be put into the vibrations, so that the sound they produced was very intense. This method depends on a recondite property of quartz, which had been discovered years before by an investigation made solely with the object of increasing our knowledge of physics without any thought of practical application. There were many other instances in the war of the practical applications of physical phenomena known previously only to students of the higher parts of physics. Indeed we should expect that any part of our knowledge of the properties of matter or of the laws of physics might receive a practical application.
- - -
The B.I.R. and the similar institutions in France and America kept in touch with each other by liaison officers: at one time the French one in England was the Louis de Broglie, a very eminent French physicist, and the American officer was my old pupil the late Professor Bumstead, then Professor of Physics in Yale University, while Sir Ernest Rutherford, Sir Richard Paget and Captain Bridge visited America and France for the same purpose.
Besides the Committee on Submarines there were Committees on Aeronautics, Naval Construction, Marine Engineering, Internal Combustion Engines, Oil Fuel, Antiaircraft, Noxious Gases and Ordnance and Ammunition.
Part of the work of the B.I.R. was the examination of the suggestions and schemes sent in by inventors, and the general public, for dealing with problems connected with the war. These were so numerous that they required a large staff of clerks and a number of experts from the Patent Office to cope with them. In the first six months after the formation of the B.I.R. we had over five thousand inventions sent in, and the number increased rapidly as the war went on. I should think before it ended the number had increased to well over 100,000; of these not more than thirty proved to be of any value. Though very little that was important for the prosecution of the war came out of this cloud of inventions, its political effect was very considerable. Every invention sent in was examined by experts: no one could say that he had sent in an important invention of which no notice was taken. If there had not been the B.I.R., many would have written to the newspapers, and created an impression that the Government were too casual about the war. Each air raid in London was followed by a crop of hundreds of suggestions for capturing the bombarding Zeppelins. Some of these were very naive. One was to have large balloons moored over London each carrying thick ropes heavily smeared with bird lime and flying at a great height. The idea was that the bombers, when they passed over London, would strike against a rope, stick to it and be captured. Another proposal for ending the war was more elaborate. It was to collect a flock of cormorants, feed them on white food, and peg this in horizontal and vertical lines against the walls of the room in which they were kept. This would give the walls the appearance of brick-work, the food representing the mortar. When they had had sufficient training, they were to be liberated as near as possible to Krupp's works at Essen. The cormorants, when they saw the chimneys, would think the mortar was food, peck it away, the chimneys would fall down, and the Germans, not being able to receive arms and munitions from Krupp's, would surrender.
Proposals like these gave no trouble: they were a comic relief in a very serious and harassing drama. There were, however, others equally ridiculous which gave a great deal of trouble. For example, we received an application from an inventor saying that he had devised a method of preventing aeroplanes passing over our lines: for this he asked £7,000,000. He would not say what the nature of the invention was, but said he would do so after we had given an undertaking that we would construct a piece of apparatus after his plans and, if it did what he claimed, give him the £7,000,000. If we had accepted this offer, it would have obliged us to take skilled mechanics, which were very difficult to get, from important work, and go to the expense of constructing a thing which it was highly improbable would be of any use: we therefore turned it down. Then paragraphs began to appear in the newspapers saying that we had rejected a scheme which might end the war, even though the inventor had agreed to let the payment depend on the scheme being successful.
- - -
Another proposal which got considerable support from some influential people came from an inventor who claimed to have produced gold from quicksilver. It is true that quicksilver in a vessel containing gas at a low pressure sometimes gets coated over with a yellow film of some compound of quicksilver when a current of electricity passes through the gas. To some people everything that glitters is gold, and the inventor, who had observed this, thought he was making gold out of quicksilver. This had been brought to the notice of the Government and again an agitation began, urging them to do something.
- - -
The most dramatic naval event in the war was the destruction of German warships at the battle of the Falkland Islands by the fast cruisers Invincible and Inflexible which he [Lord Fisher] had introduced into the Navy. He was strongly in favour of using oil fuel in our ships, and he often talked of the desirability and possibility of submersible cruisers. Though he did so much to introduce into the Navy every possible mechanical contrivance which could make it more efficient, yet in his view the tactics of this mechanised fleet should be as full of the spirit of adventure as those of the old Navy.
- - -
The experience we had at the B.I.R. showed the danger of leaving the investigation of the applications of science until war breaks out, trusting to being able to improvise some makeshift on the spur of the moment. The transition from the laboratory to the workshop or to the ship is one that in most cases takes a long time and much work and expense. Effects which are of trivial importance in the small-scale experiments in the laboratory, may be vital on the large scale necessary for practical utility. Faraday said of his discovery of the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction that it was a babe, and no one could say what it might do when it grew to manhood; but it took more than thirty years for it to pass from the nursery of the laboratory to the rough-and-tumble of the workshop.
- - -
My experience at the B.I.R. brought home to me how intense and widespread was the eagerness of men of science to do something to help to win the war. Many problems came before us on which it was important to get expert opinion from physicists, chemists, engineers and mathematicians.
- - -
He [Richard Threlfall] had given up his Professorship at Sydney some time before, and had become a member of the firm Albright & Wilson of Oldbury, near Birmingham, the largest manufacturers of phosphorus in the country, and probably knew more than anyone else in England about phosphorus. He applied this knowledge with great success to war purposes and, through him, phosphorus played a considerable part in the war. It was used for making smoke screens behind which a vessel could hide from an enemy ship. His phosphorus bombs, too, proved very useful. He was also the first to suggest the use of helium in place of hydrogen for airships. Helium is not inflammable and does not explode, and so is a complete safeguard against fire. An airship requires, however, a very large quantity of helium, and at that time there were no appreciable supplies in our Empire. [...] The best results were given by a well in the Bow River district in Ontario, where there was about 3 parts of helium in 1000 parts of the gas coming out of the earth. This, though much smaller than that for the Texas wells, is much larger than any known in other parts of our Empire.
Threlfall was a chemist and engineer as well as a physicist, so that his services were in continual request for reports on projects submitted to the B.I.R..
- - -
CAMBRIDGE DURING THE WAR
With the breaking out of the war in August 1914 there began a period lasting for more than four years when everyone had to give up his usual work and turn to something which might help to enable us to win the war. Those undergraduates who were physically fit joined the Army, taking at first commissions in the Regular Army, and later in Kitchener's. The older men helped with the work in Government offices, e.g. the Foreign Office and the Admiralty. Some who had an especially intimate knowledge of some foreign language, or were adepts at acrostics or cryptograms, joined the department which was established for decoding the German wireless messages; others went as masters in schools to free a younger man for service in the Army. Some of those who remained in Cambridge undertook to patrol the streets at night to see that all lights were out, as it was thought very important to make it as difficult as possible for the Zeppelins to locate Cambridge. In this they were very successful, as Cambridge was never bombed in the war, though bombs fell within a few miles. It was so dark at night that people who, like myself, are bad at seeing in the dark, when they went out, were continually bumping into people in the streets.
- - -
The cloisters of Trinity College very early in the war were used for a hospital for some of those wounded in the earlier battles.
- - -
The loss of Trinity men in the war was grievously large: on the panels in the College Chapel the names of more than 600 Trinity men who fell in the war are inscribed, including three of the younger Fellows of the College. Keith Lucas, F.R.S., killed in an aeroplane accident, was a College Lecturer in natural science, and a man of remarkable ability. He had done important work in physiology; he excelled also in designing instruments for scientific research, and invented an internal combustion engine on a novel principle.
- - -
[...] the names of many younger men who had already distinguished themselves in many walks of life, and done enough to show that much might have been expected from them. They one and all have endowed the College with the precious heritage of being able to count among its members so many who have made the supreme sacrifice for their country.
- - -
About 16,000 Cambridge men served in the war: of these 2652 were killed, 3460 wounded and 497 reported as missing or prisoners; 12 obtained the Victoria Cross, 899 the D.S.O. and 5036 were mentioned in dispatches.
Things were at the worst in the academical year 1917-18. Only 281 students matriculated; the number of men students had fallen to a fraction of the normal value, and since the greater part of the income of the University comes from fees, the financial position was very serious.
- - -
The Armistice was signed in November 1918. The Government made liberal grants to help those who had served in the war to come back to the University, and these did so in great numbers.
- - -
The war had lasted for more than four years, which is a year longer than an undergraduate's stay in College, and we were afraid that there might be no one to hand down the traditional conventions, to restart the clubs and other forms of undergraduate activity. This fear, however, proved baseless: though these students had gone through the grim experiences of the war and were older than the pre-war undergraduates, it was surprising to see how like their ways were in most things. They talked very little about the war; they seemed almost to wish to blot it out of then-lives, and to have just the same experiences as those who came before them. There was no breach of continuity, in fact hardly a bump in the crossing from war to post-war times. As the boat race takes place in March and no one had returned until the middle of January there was no time to make preparations, but the cricket match with Oxford, which is not played until July, came off.
The cessation of the war relieved us from much anguish and anxiety and raised great hopes: we thought that, as we had weathered the storm, the rest would be comparatively plain sailing to prosperity greater than the nation had ever had before. These hopes have certainly not been fulfilled. I think, too, there has been a considerable change in the views about war held by not a few of the younger men. In the war there were in the University some conscientious objectors, but not very many; several of these were Quakers, and the greater number objected to war on religious grounds. There were very few whose sincerity could be questioned; indeed it required great moral courage, or exceptional physical cowardice, to face the odium of being a conscientious objector rather than go to the Front. I think in another war the conscientious objector will be a much more serious difficulty than he was in the last: there will be many who would fight to defend their country if it were attacked, but who would not go into another country and attack it.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t63tJVkDEew
http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1906/thomson/documentary
http://manualdaquimica.uol.com.br/quimica-geral/modelo-atomico-thomson.htm
- - -
The most urgent need of the Admiralty at the time the B.I.R. was instituted was some method of detecting submarines, and means were taken at once to start experiments with this subject. The most obvious method of detecting a submarine is by the sound it makes. It had long been known that sound travels well through water, and various methods had been devised for detecting it. Thus, if a tube is closed at one end with a diaphragm and lowered into water through which sounds are passing, the diaphragm will be thrown into vibration and produce in the air in the tube sound waves of the same pitch as those in the water. These can easily be detected by the ear or by a microphone. The problem of detecting a moving submarine by the sound it makes is a most difficult and complicated one. In the first place, the vessel which is hunting the submarine itself produces noises when it is not at rest, by its engines, its motion through the water, and so on. In bad weather these drown all others. Thus a microphone submerged in the water and carried along by a ship will give tongue even when there are no submarines in the neighbourhood.
- - -
[...] any resonance effect will destroy the quality of the noise of the submarine and make it more difficult to detect. It would be much easier than it is to detect a submarine, if it were a musical instrument and gave out a definite note. Even if we can identify a noise as due to a submarine we require, if we are to catch it, to know the direction from which it comes. The velocity of sound through water is about 4-3 times that through air. This will be the proportion between the wave-length in water and air respectively. An opaque object placed in the way of a wave will not cast a definite shadow unless the diameter of the object is many times the wave-length. Thus if we determine the direction of the sound in water by placing an object in its way and finding where the shadow is, we have to use much larger objects than would be necessary in air.
The B.I.R. began their attack on the detection of submarines by obtaining from Sir Ernest Rutherford a report on the various methods which had been employed, or suggested, for detecting sounds in water. He reported that the microphone method was by far the most promising.
- - -
The Submarine Committee of the B.I.R., after a visit to Hawkcraig in September 1916, reported that conditions were unsatisfactory. One cause of this was that the Navy was then divided into two parties, Fisherites and Anti-Fisherites, and that every scheme associated in any way with Lord Fisher was regarded by the latter party with grave suspicion and dislike. There was so much prejudice of this kind that I believe B.I.R. was said by the Anti-Fisher party to stand for Board of Intrigue and Revenge. Towards the end of 1916 it was decided to transfer the work of the B.I.R. on submarines from Hawkcraig to Harwich, and a laboratory was built at Parkeston Quay. This change improved matters, but it had involved a loss of several months just at the time when a detector had been devised which, as far as could be tested by experiments on a small scale, promised to be of service in detecting submarines. It was essential that it should be tested by fitting the apparatus to some vessels in the Fleet and seeing how it behaved under service conditions. It was only to be expected that under these conditions defects would be detected which would require further experiments at the Experimental Station to overcome. If it had not been for the delays just mentioned, efficient submarine detectors would have been available months earlier than they were and much loss of life prevented.
- - -
Professor Langevin, whom I am proud to be able to say is an old pupil of mine, discovered, when working in France at the detection of submarines, a method by which oscillations could be produced in plates of quartz, so rapid that their wave-lengths were small compared with the size of the plate, and which allowed a great amount of energy to be put into the vibrations, so that the sound they produced was very intense. This method depends on a recondite property of quartz, which had been discovered years before by an investigation made solely with the object of increasing our knowledge of physics without any thought of practical application. There were many other instances in the war of the practical applications of physical phenomena known previously only to students of the higher parts of physics. Indeed we should expect that any part of our knowledge of the properties of matter or of the laws of physics might receive a practical application.
- - -
The B.I.R. and the similar institutions in France and America kept in touch with each other by liaison officers: at one time the French one in England was the Louis de Broglie, a very eminent French physicist, and the American officer was my old pupil the late Professor Bumstead, then Professor of Physics in Yale University, while Sir Ernest Rutherford, Sir Richard Paget and Captain Bridge visited America and France for the same purpose.
Besides the Committee on Submarines there were Committees on Aeronautics, Naval Construction, Marine Engineering, Internal Combustion Engines, Oil Fuel, Antiaircraft, Noxious Gases and Ordnance and Ammunition.
Part of the work of the B.I.R. was the examination of the suggestions and schemes sent in by inventors, and the general public, for dealing with problems connected with the war. These were so numerous that they required a large staff of clerks and a number of experts from the Patent Office to cope with them. In the first six months after the formation of the B.I.R. we had over five thousand inventions sent in, and the number increased rapidly as the war went on. I should think before it ended the number had increased to well over 100,000; of these not more than thirty proved to be of any value. Though very little that was important for the prosecution of the war came out of this cloud of inventions, its political effect was very considerable. Every invention sent in was examined by experts: no one could say that he had sent in an important invention of which no notice was taken. If there had not been the B.I.R., many would have written to the newspapers, and created an impression that the Government were too casual about the war. Each air raid in London was followed by a crop of hundreds of suggestions for capturing the bombarding Zeppelins. Some of these were very naive. One was to have large balloons moored over London each carrying thick ropes heavily smeared with bird lime and flying at a great height. The idea was that the bombers, when they passed over London, would strike against a rope, stick to it and be captured. Another proposal for ending the war was more elaborate. It was to collect a flock of cormorants, feed them on white food, and peg this in horizontal and vertical lines against the walls of the room in which they were kept. This would give the walls the appearance of brick-work, the food representing the mortar. When they had had sufficient training, they were to be liberated as near as possible to Krupp's works at Essen. The cormorants, when they saw the chimneys, would think the mortar was food, peck it away, the chimneys would fall down, and the Germans, not being able to receive arms and munitions from Krupp's, would surrender.
Proposals like these gave no trouble: they were a comic relief in a very serious and harassing drama. There were, however, others equally ridiculous which gave a great deal of trouble. For example, we received an application from an inventor saying that he had devised a method of preventing aeroplanes passing over our lines: for this he asked £7,000,000. He would not say what the nature of the invention was, but said he would do so after we had given an undertaking that we would construct a piece of apparatus after his plans and, if it did what he claimed, give him the £7,000,000. If we had accepted this offer, it would have obliged us to take skilled mechanics, which were very difficult to get, from important work, and go to the expense of constructing a thing which it was highly improbable would be of any use: we therefore turned it down. Then paragraphs began to appear in the newspapers saying that we had rejected a scheme which might end the war, even though the inventor had agreed to let the payment depend on the scheme being successful.
- - -
Another proposal which got considerable support from some influential people came from an inventor who claimed to have produced gold from quicksilver. It is true that quicksilver in a vessel containing gas at a low pressure sometimes gets coated over with a yellow film of some compound of quicksilver when a current of electricity passes through the gas. To some people everything that glitters is gold, and the inventor, who had observed this, thought he was making gold out of quicksilver. This had been brought to the notice of the Government and again an agitation began, urging them to do something.
- - -
The most dramatic naval event in the war was the destruction of German warships at the battle of the Falkland Islands by the fast cruisers Invincible and Inflexible which he [Lord Fisher] had introduced into the Navy. He was strongly in favour of using oil fuel in our ships, and he often talked of the desirability and possibility of submersible cruisers. Though he did so much to introduce into the Navy every possible mechanical contrivance which could make it more efficient, yet in his view the tactics of this mechanised fleet should be as full of the spirit of adventure as those of the old Navy.
- - -
The experience we had at the B.I.R. showed the danger of leaving the investigation of the applications of science until war breaks out, trusting to being able to improvise some makeshift on the spur of the moment. The transition from the laboratory to the workshop or to the ship is one that in most cases takes a long time and much work and expense. Effects which are of trivial importance in the small-scale experiments in the laboratory, may be vital on the large scale necessary for practical utility. Faraday said of his discovery of the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction that it was a babe, and no one could say what it might do when it grew to manhood; but it took more than thirty years for it to pass from the nursery of the laboratory to the rough-and-tumble of the workshop.
- - -
My experience at the B.I.R. brought home to me how intense and widespread was the eagerness of men of science to do something to help to win the war. Many problems came before us on which it was important to get expert opinion from physicists, chemists, engineers and mathematicians.
- - -
He [Richard Threlfall] had given up his Professorship at Sydney some time before, and had become a member of the firm Albright & Wilson of Oldbury, near Birmingham, the largest manufacturers of phosphorus in the country, and probably knew more than anyone else in England about phosphorus. He applied this knowledge with great success to war purposes and, through him, phosphorus played a considerable part in the war. It was used for making smoke screens behind which a vessel could hide from an enemy ship. His phosphorus bombs, too, proved very useful. He was also the first to suggest the use of helium in place of hydrogen for airships. Helium is not inflammable and does not explode, and so is a complete safeguard against fire. An airship requires, however, a very large quantity of helium, and at that time there were no appreciable supplies in our Empire. [...] The best results were given by a well in the Bow River district in Ontario, where there was about 3 parts of helium in 1000 parts of the gas coming out of the earth. This, though much smaller than that for the Texas wells, is much larger than any known in other parts of our Empire.
Threlfall was a chemist and engineer as well as a physicist, so that his services were in continual request for reports on projects submitted to the B.I.R..
- - -
CAMBRIDGE DURING THE WAR
With the breaking out of the war in August 1914 there began a period lasting for more than four years when everyone had to give up his usual work and turn to something which might help to enable us to win the war. Those undergraduates who were physically fit joined the Army, taking at first commissions in the Regular Army, and later in Kitchener's. The older men helped with the work in Government offices, e.g. the Foreign Office and the Admiralty. Some who had an especially intimate knowledge of some foreign language, or were adepts at acrostics or cryptograms, joined the department which was established for decoding the German wireless messages; others went as masters in schools to free a younger man for service in the Army. Some of those who remained in Cambridge undertook to patrol the streets at night to see that all lights were out, as it was thought very important to make it as difficult as possible for the Zeppelins to locate Cambridge. In this they were very successful, as Cambridge was never bombed in the war, though bombs fell within a few miles. It was so dark at night that people who, like myself, are bad at seeing in the dark, when they went out, were continually bumping into people in the streets.
- - -
The cloisters of Trinity College very early in the war were used for a hospital for some of those wounded in the earlier battles.
- - -
The loss of Trinity men in the war was grievously large: on the panels in the College Chapel the names of more than 600 Trinity men who fell in the war are inscribed, including three of the younger Fellows of the College. Keith Lucas, F.R.S., killed in an aeroplane accident, was a College Lecturer in natural science, and a man of remarkable ability. He had done important work in physiology; he excelled also in designing instruments for scientific research, and invented an internal combustion engine on a novel principle.
- - -
[...] the names of many younger men who had already distinguished themselves in many walks of life, and done enough to show that much might have been expected from them. They one and all have endowed the College with the precious heritage of being able to count among its members so many who have made the supreme sacrifice for their country.
- - -
About 16,000 Cambridge men served in the war: of these 2652 were killed, 3460 wounded and 497 reported as missing or prisoners; 12 obtained the Victoria Cross, 899 the D.S.O. and 5036 were mentioned in dispatches.
Things were at the worst in the academical year 1917-18. Only 281 students matriculated; the number of men students had fallen to a fraction of the normal value, and since the greater part of the income of the University comes from fees, the financial position was very serious.
- - -
The Armistice was signed in November 1918. The Government made liberal grants to help those who had served in the war to come back to the University, and these did so in great numbers.
- - -
The war had lasted for more than four years, which is a year longer than an undergraduate's stay in College, and we were afraid that there might be no one to hand down the traditional conventions, to restart the clubs and other forms of undergraduate activity. This fear, however, proved baseless: though these students had gone through the grim experiences of the war and were older than the pre-war undergraduates, it was surprising to see how like their ways were in most things. They talked very little about the war; they seemed almost to wish to blot it out of then-lives, and to have just the same experiences as those who came before them. There was no breach of continuity, in fact hardly a bump in the crossing from war to post-war times. As the boat race takes place in March and no one had returned until the middle of January there was no time to make preparations, but the cricket match with Oxford, which is not played until July, came off.
The cessation of the war relieved us from much anguish and anxiety and raised great hopes: we thought that, as we had weathered the storm, the rest would be comparatively plain sailing to prosperity greater than the nation had ever had before. These hopes have certainly not been fulfilled. I think, too, there has been a considerable change in the views about war held by not a few of the younger men. In the war there were in the University some conscientious objectors, but not very many; several of these were Quakers, and the greater number objected to war on religious grounds. There were very few whose sincerity could be questioned; indeed it required great moral courage, or exceptional physical cowardice, to face the odium of being a conscientious objector rather than go to the Front. I think in another war the conscientious objector will be a much more serious difficulty than he was in the last: there will be many who would fight to defend their country if it were attacked, but who would not go into another country and attack it.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t63tJVkDEew
http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1906/thomson/documentary
http://manualdaquimica.uol.com.br/quimica-geral/modelo-atomico-thomson.htm
