Sir J. J. Thomson, O.M., F.R.S

Abstract

IT is not easy even to recapture any adequate sense of the influence which J. J. Thomson exerted on science in schools in the earlier days of this century. Electrons and J. J. Thomson were spoken of mysteriously by physics masters with the same bated breath. He came into my life, as into those of so many others, long before I came up to Trinity, when as a schoolboy I got hold of a copy of the “Discharge of Electricity through Gases”, devoured it, found it much too hard to understand, resented especially its use of integral signs (which I had not yet “got to”), but gained such thrills from the parts I could understand that I even read it on Sundays, and found it worth the rebuke I received at home for violating the Sabbath. It sent me to his early Phil. Mag. papers of 1880 or so, on the stability of rings of charged corpuscles inside a sphere of the opposite sign of charge. One may be allowed to recall that “J. J.” was a mathematician before he was a physicist. Afterwards, when one had come up to Trinity, one heard it rumoured that “J. J.Rdquo; liked doing his mathematics for himself, but that when in difficulties he had recourse to “J. L.” next door. As an undergraduate reading not physics but mathematics, one's contacts with him were indirect; one envied those who brought tales of his lectures at the Cavendish on “Properties of Matter”, or the research students who brought tales of the laboratory teas there. One set of pictures, however, remains: those of “J. J.” regularly attending Sunday evening chapel in Trinity, coming in at the very last moment, with surplice and M.A. hood, standing at the right moments with these, articles of dress peculiarly crooked, and looking as if his soul were far away— a notable contrast to his saintly looking predecessor in the Master's pew. Later, one got to know and be thankful for his kindly courtesy to junior fellows, for the avoidance of whose awkwardness he so readily provided conversational opportunities, covering up one's more unusually fatuous remarks with the characteristic resonant half-grunt, half-laugh that concluded his own sallies. He had withal a somewhat disconcerting directness of suddenly asking a question pertinent and penetrating, amidst the vagueness of introductory conversations; and his face, previously turned aside as though interested (as in Chapel) in things miles away, would gleam with enjoyment as he thought of some teasing but kindly remark to make about the common acquaintance he had inquired after. His best story about physicists can scarcely yet be re-told, for the protagonists are still living; but the pungency of his description of the final interview between those heroic figures was worthy of the tradition maintained by masters of Trinity: “both were speechless, the one silent from rage and the other for the usual reason”. On one of the occasions on which I heard him tell this story he slyly added: “And when one of them later wrote a book about physics, and NATURE asked me to review it, instead of doing so I filled in the little empty space at the bottom with the name of the other”. History does not record whether NATURE took that advice, whether if so the review was written, and if so again whether it was printable. Thus did “J. J.” make his open study on late Sunday evenings a place of scientific gaiety.