Trechos de H.G.J. Moseley: The Life And Letters Of An English Physicist (1974), de J.L. Heilbron.
In 1912, encouraged by a travel grant of £15,000, the British Association for the Advancement of Science agreed to hold its meeting for 1914 in Australia. After several changes of mind Harry [Moseley] decided that he was far enough ahead of that "horde of hungry Germans," his competitors, to spare the time to attend, and on June 12, 1914, he and Amabel, who went to see the scenery and some Australian cousins, sailed from Liverpool.
- - -
[...] reading a paper at Sydney on "High Frequency Spectra" and in participating at Melbourne in an unusually well-attended session on the structure of the atom.
Rutherford opened the discussion by emphasizing the important corroboration of the nuclear model supplied by α scattering and van den Broek's hypothesis, securely anchored by Moseley's formulae.
- - -
The quick mobilization of the Australians and their strong feeling for the mother country intensified Moseley's own sense of duty, and the unquestioning patriotism instilled by the public schools. He left the commonwealth - whose sons he would meet soon enough again - on August 29, on the first ship he could get after delivering his paper at Sydney.
- - -
Moseley had then been on active military service for precisely three months. He had begun to train on his return voyage, "reading up a smattering from War Office manuals, and practicing flag wagging, Morse and semaphore while crossing the Pacific".
- - -
Harry had decided to commission himself in the Royal Engineers. The Engineers preferred engineers, and declined. That of course did not discourage Harry at all. "[I am] trying to pull private strings," he wrote Margery on October 10, "but unfortunately find them working rather rustily at present, since nobody seems to know which is the right string to pull." [...] on October 17, Harry arrived at Aldershot.
After a month's "strenuous and interesting" training, in which he learned to signal by semaphore and ride without stirrups, Harry was transferred to an "incredibly gloomy" camp at Bulford on the Salisbury Plain. There he lived in the mud with "splendid fellows, very keen and well-educated," who were learning to set up military communications systems. He did not find the work altogether "amusing," however, and for a few weeks after Christmas he labored as hard to leave the Engineers as he had to enter them. The cause of his infidelity was his first airplane flight, which he made on a day miraculously free from rain. He immediately decided to transfer to the Royal Flying Corps. He then encountered an object even he could not budge: the inefficiency and indifference of the military bureaucracy. It took ten days for his application to proceed through the Engineers, the War Office and the "flying hierarchy to the people really concerned, who have written back through the same channel to enquire my weight. No doubt [he complained to Amabel] more enquiries will follow through the same chain concerning my eyesight and my moral character etc. each at an interval of ten days. If only the channel could be short circuited..."
In the middle of February Harry's company was attached to the 13th Infantry Division at Woking. He himself became responsible for the communications of one of the division's brigades, the 38th, "quite an interesting little job," he wrote Rutherford, since "I and my 26 men will be quite on our own as soon as we get to the Front."
At the beginning of April, when the 38th was enjoying springtime maneuvers in the Surrey countryside, General Sir Ian Hamilton was assembling an army in the eastern Mediterranean for an invasion of the peninsula of Gallipoli.
- - -
On June 7 the government agreed to Hamilton's request for more units and ordered three divisions of the New Army, including the 13th, to the East. Harry, who had inferred from the delay in shipping his brigade that it was reserved for the Mediterranean, had his suspicions confirmed by orders to draw sunhats and tropical kits. [...] prepared, and armed with a .32 caliber revolver and an air cushion, he set sail from Avonmouth on June 15, 1915.
It soon became excessively hot. Alexandria, which he reached by June 27, was "full of heat flies native troops and Australians"; it reminded him of his mortality, and there he composed his will, leaving his entire estate to the Royal Society of London. [...] "We moved yesterday [13 July 15] to a place where the road is worse than the flies. Sand in boots clothes mouth eyes hair. Sand in the food and the water and the air." There were also bullets and dysentery. Harry undertook to protect his flock from both, from the first by inculcating "prudence by example," from the second by Spartan diets and great doses of chlorodyne supplied by Amabel for the purpose. He lost three men to dysentery and one to the Turks.
After three weeks at Helles the 38th proceeded to the harbor of Murdos, on the island of Lemnos, a staging area about seventy miles from Anzac. There Harry spent a few pleasant days swimming in the Mediterranean and hiking in the parched and barren hills, which he found to be "thick with worked flints." With fresh eggs and fruit collected from a nearby village and amenities like Bovril and silk pyjamas commanded from Amabel, he made himself almost comfortable.
- - -
The 38th managed to hold the Farm and part of the hill for the 8th and 9th of August, but it never reached Chanuk Bair.
Early on the morning of the 10th the enemy counterattacked. Machine guns raked Farm Hill from the high ground to the right while 30,000 Turks poured over Chanuk Bair. They annihilated the 6/Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, a battalion from the 38th which had replaced the exhausted New Zealanders on Rhododendron Hill. [...] "So desperate a battle cannot be described. The Turks came on again and again, fighting magnificently, calling upon the name of God. Our men stood to it, and maintained, by many a deed of daring, the old traditions of their race. There was no flinching. They died in the ranks where they stood." Brigadier-General Baldwin and his brigade-major fell in the front line. So did the brigade signal officer, second lieutenant Moseley*, the most promising of all the English physicists of his generation.
[* shot in the head by a Turkish sniper while in the act of telephoning a military order (Wikipedia)]
- - -
Moseley's death was widely reported. Belligerents on both sides paused to observe his passing. After recovering themselves the British scientists used his death as a strong stick for bullying (as Harry would have said) the War Office: "The loss of this young man on the battlefield," said Rutherford, "(is) a striking example of the misuse of scientific talent." "To use such a man as a subaltern [is] economically equivalent to using the Lusitania to carry a pound of butter from Ramsgate to Margate." It came out that the Royal Society had sought his return; that papers had gone forward, but too late. These facts, together with references to Harry's "immortal discovery" lifted from a lecture by Oliver Lodge, who had himself lost a son in the war, were retailed in the daily press under captions like "Sacrifice of a Genius" and "Too Valuable To Die." There is little doubt that Harry's death helped Rutherford and his colleagues convince the public that scientific brains, being a national and even a military asset, should be conserved in time of war.
Had the War Office a clear conception of the military value of physicists, it would have asked Harry (as it did Rutherford and Bragg) to develop a weapon against submarines or (as it did Tizard) to improve the performance of bombers. He would have refused both. Well meaning and influential friends did in fact arrange for him to work on aircraft design; he replied that, since the operation was run entirely by civilians, nothing would have pleased him better, had he happened to be physically unfit. As it was, nothing could keep him from the front. He and the 5,000 other Old Etonians who rushed to the colors with him thought it their duty to be under fire. As Harry's old school fellow Charles Lister put it when declining a safe job as an interpreter: "The date of my birth determines that I should take active service." He too pulled strings to enter a combat division and died in the Mediterranean.
Harry received several posthumous honors, most notably a gold medal, the premio Matteucci, from the Società Italiana delle Scienze. Commemorative plaques were put up in Manchester and at Eton, where a verse by Eggar records Harry's first exposure to X radiation. At Summer Fields one of the four competitive "leagues" into which the school is divided proudly took the name Moseley. A certain Professor Hamer, of the University of Pittsburgh, proposed that element 43, of whose imminent discovery he had heard inklings, be called "Moseleyum," "a name," he said, "better and more international in character like true science itself than a latinized name of the discoverer's own kingdom or republic." His suggestion was ignored, except by the editors of Nature, who observed that it would be a fitting tribute, despite its want of precedent and euphony. Today, after "Lawrencium," "Mendelevium," and "Nobelium," there can be no reservation on either count; and we may hope eventually to see "Moseleyum" attached to a deserving element beyond uranium.
- - -
As Harry had foreseen, his work, X-ray spectroscopy, contributed importantly to the decisive solution to the problem of atomic structure. Most directly, Moseley's law secured the cardinal result of the English School of atom builders, namely the identification of the rank of an element in the periodic table (Z) with the number of electrons (n) in its constituent atoms. [...] By the war's end most physicists had altogether forgotten the reservations of Hicks, Lindemann and Nicholson; and Moseley's law, recognized (to use the words of de Broglie) as "one of the greatest advances yet made in natural philosophy," was widely taken as proof of the doctrine of atomic number, and as the best available evidence for the equality of n and Z.
Moseley's legacy also contributed to several key improvements in the quantum theory of the atom.
Mais:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2013/08/12/henry-moseley-single-most-costly-death-war
http://neuroquantology.com/data-cms/articles/20191023125647pm158.pdf
- - -
[...] reading a paper at Sydney on "High Frequency Spectra" and in participating at Melbourne in an unusually well-attended session on the structure of the atom.
Rutherford opened the discussion by emphasizing the important corroboration of the nuclear model supplied by α scattering and van den Broek's hypothesis, securely anchored by Moseley's formulae.
- - -
The quick mobilization of the Australians and their strong feeling for the mother country intensified Moseley's own sense of duty, and the unquestioning patriotism instilled by the public schools. He left the commonwealth - whose sons he would meet soon enough again - on August 29, on the first ship he could get after delivering his paper at Sydney.
- - -
Moseley had then been on active military service for precisely three months. He had begun to train on his return voyage, "reading up a smattering from War Office manuals, and practicing flag wagging, Morse and semaphore while crossing the Pacific".
- - -
Harry had decided to commission himself in the Royal Engineers. The Engineers preferred engineers, and declined. That of course did not discourage Harry at all. "[I am] trying to pull private strings," he wrote Margery on October 10, "but unfortunately find them working rather rustily at present, since nobody seems to know which is the right string to pull." [...] on October 17, Harry arrived at Aldershot.
After a month's "strenuous and interesting" training, in which he learned to signal by semaphore and ride without stirrups, Harry was transferred to an "incredibly gloomy" camp at Bulford on the Salisbury Plain. There he lived in the mud with "splendid fellows, very keen and well-educated," who were learning to set up military communications systems. He did not find the work altogether "amusing," however, and for a few weeks after Christmas he labored as hard to leave the Engineers as he had to enter them. The cause of his infidelity was his first airplane flight, which he made on a day miraculously free from rain. He immediately decided to transfer to the Royal Flying Corps. He then encountered an object even he could not budge: the inefficiency and indifference of the military bureaucracy. It took ten days for his application to proceed through the Engineers, the War Office and the "flying hierarchy to the people really concerned, who have written back through the same channel to enquire my weight. No doubt [he complained to Amabel] more enquiries will follow through the same chain concerning my eyesight and my moral character etc. each at an interval of ten days. If only the channel could be short circuited..."
In the middle of February Harry's company was attached to the 13th Infantry Division at Woking. He himself became responsible for the communications of one of the division's brigades, the 38th, "quite an interesting little job," he wrote Rutherford, since "I and my 26 men will be quite on our own as soon as we get to the Front."
At the beginning of April, when the 38th was enjoying springtime maneuvers in the Surrey countryside, General Sir Ian Hamilton was assembling an army in the eastern Mediterranean for an invasion of the peninsula of Gallipoli.
- - -
On June 7 the government agreed to Hamilton's request for more units and ordered three divisions of the New Army, including the 13th, to the East. Harry, who had inferred from the delay in shipping his brigade that it was reserved for the Mediterranean, had his suspicions confirmed by orders to draw sunhats and tropical kits. [...] prepared, and armed with a .32 caliber revolver and an air cushion, he set sail from Avonmouth on June 15, 1915.
It soon became excessively hot. Alexandria, which he reached by June 27, was "full of heat flies native troops and Australians"; it reminded him of his mortality, and there he composed his will, leaving his entire estate to the Royal Society of London. [...] "We moved yesterday [13 July 15] to a place where the road is worse than the flies. Sand in boots clothes mouth eyes hair. Sand in the food and the water and the air." There were also bullets and dysentery. Harry undertook to protect his flock from both, from the first by inculcating "prudence by example," from the second by Spartan diets and great doses of chlorodyne supplied by Amabel for the purpose. He lost three men to dysentery and one to the Turks.
After three weeks at Helles the 38th proceeded to the harbor of Murdos, on the island of Lemnos, a staging area about seventy miles from Anzac. There Harry spent a few pleasant days swimming in the Mediterranean and hiking in the parched and barren hills, which he found to be "thick with worked flints." With fresh eggs and fruit collected from a nearby village and amenities like Bovril and silk pyjamas commanded from Amabel, he made himself almost comfortable.
- - -
The 38th managed to hold the Farm and part of the hill for the 8th and 9th of August, but it never reached Chanuk Bair.
Early on the morning of the 10th the enemy counterattacked. Machine guns raked Farm Hill from the high ground to the right while 30,000 Turks poured over Chanuk Bair. They annihilated the 6/Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, a battalion from the 38th which had replaced the exhausted New Zealanders on Rhododendron Hill. [...] "So desperate a battle cannot be described. The Turks came on again and again, fighting magnificently, calling upon the name of God. Our men stood to it, and maintained, by many a deed of daring, the old traditions of their race. There was no flinching. They died in the ranks where they stood." Brigadier-General Baldwin and his brigade-major fell in the front line. So did the brigade signal officer, second lieutenant Moseley*, the most promising of all the English physicists of his generation.
[* shot in the head by a Turkish sniper while in the act of telephoning a military order (Wikipedia)]
- - -
Moseley's death was widely reported. Belligerents on both sides paused to observe his passing. After recovering themselves the British scientists used his death as a strong stick for bullying (as Harry would have said) the War Office: "The loss of this young man on the battlefield," said Rutherford, "(is) a striking example of the misuse of scientific talent." "To use such a man as a subaltern [is] economically equivalent to using the Lusitania to carry a pound of butter from Ramsgate to Margate." It came out that the Royal Society had sought his return; that papers had gone forward, but too late. These facts, together with references to Harry's "immortal discovery" lifted from a lecture by Oliver Lodge, who had himself lost a son in the war, were retailed in the daily press under captions like "Sacrifice of a Genius" and "Too Valuable To Die." There is little doubt that Harry's death helped Rutherford and his colleagues convince the public that scientific brains, being a national and even a military asset, should be conserved in time of war.
Had the War Office a clear conception of the military value of physicists, it would have asked Harry (as it did Rutherford and Bragg) to develop a weapon against submarines or (as it did Tizard) to improve the performance of bombers. He would have refused both. Well meaning and influential friends did in fact arrange for him to work on aircraft design; he replied that, since the operation was run entirely by civilians, nothing would have pleased him better, had he happened to be physically unfit. As it was, nothing could keep him from the front. He and the 5,000 other Old Etonians who rushed to the colors with him thought it their duty to be under fire. As Harry's old school fellow Charles Lister put it when declining a safe job as an interpreter: "The date of my birth determines that I should take active service." He too pulled strings to enter a combat division and died in the Mediterranean.
Harry received several posthumous honors, most notably a gold medal, the premio Matteucci, from the Società Italiana delle Scienze. Commemorative plaques were put up in Manchester and at Eton, where a verse by Eggar records Harry's first exposure to X radiation. At Summer Fields one of the four competitive "leagues" into which the school is divided proudly took the name Moseley. A certain Professor Hamer, of the University of Pittsburgh, proposed that element 43, of whose imminent discovery he had heard inklings, be called "Moseleyum," "a name," he said, "better and more international in character like true science itself than a latinized name of the discoverer's own kingdom or republic." His suggestion was ignored, except by the editors of Nature, who observed that it would be a fitting tribute, despite its want of precedent and euphony. Today, after "Lawrencium," "Mendelevium," and "Nobelium," there can be no reservation on either count; and we may hope eventually to see "Moseleyum" attached to a deserving element beyond uranium.
- - -
As Harry had foreseen, his work, X-ray spectroscopy, contributed importantly to the decisive solution to the problem of atomic structure. Most directly, Moseley's law secured the cardinal result of the English School of atom builders, namely the identification of the rank of an element in the periodic table (Z) with the number of electrons (n) in its constituent atoms. [...] By the war's end most physicists had altogether forgotten the reservations of Hicks, Lindemann and Nicholson; and Moseley's law, recognized (to use the words of de Broglie) as "one of the greatest advances yet made in natural philosophy," was widely taken as proof of the doctrine of atomic number, and as the best available evidence for the equality of n and Z.
Moseley's legacy also contributed to several key improvements in the quantum theory of the atom.
Mais:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2013/08/12/henry-moseley-single-most-costly-death-war
http://neuroquantology.com/data-cms/articles/20191023125647pm158.pdf
