From the (Library) Bookshelf: The Fly in the Cathedral
I signed some books on science out of the library lately, several of which I had read before. I may not have been putting too much thought into their selection beyond "I'm going to read this book I haven't read before, but I think I'll read these again too," but somewhat later I found myself a little intrigued by one of my choices. "The Fly in the Cathedral," by Brian Cathcart, is subtitled "How a small group of Cambridge scientists won the race to split the atom," and the first time I read it I thought of the history contained in it as a sort of "untold story" from the era I had seen described in some of the earlier chapters of Richard Rhodes's "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," which focused more on events mentioned almost in passing in this book, such as the discovery of the neutron. With the book out of the library again, though, I happened to think that it was, in fact, as much about the construction of the first particle accelerators as about "splitting the atom." This was no doubt prompted by the recent publicity about the activation of the Large Hadron Collider (even if it had to be shut down not that long after being started up for troubleshooting). The thought formed did perhaps leave me wondering if "nostalgia is a deceptive thing," if a machine assembled in a laboratory lecture room, vacuum-sealed for a time with plasticene, and whose detector was an observer crouched in a lead-lined box at the base, peering through a microscope at a fluorescent screen that registered particle impacts, is more "appealing" than modern "big science." On the other hand, the book's description of the press coverage at the time did note that there was just a bit of worry back then about how it "might get out of hand." The quest for deeper knowledge is, of course, a deeper consistency.