Trump falsely claims Manchester’s nuclear split achievement

Despite Donald Trump’s claims in his inauguration speech, it is not the US but Manchester-based scientists who have made a “significant breakthrough” in splitting the atom, a lecturer at a city university says.

The 47th US President mistakenly included this achievement among his country’s achievements during his address in Washington DC after taking oath on Monday.

In fact, that honor belongs to Sir Ernest Rutherford of New Zealand, who in 1919 demonstrated during experiments at Victoria University of Manchester that atoms could be split.

Dr. James Sumner, lecturer in the history of technology at the University of Manchester, suggested that the President had confused the discovery with the later creation of the atomic bomb.

“I don’t think he (Trump) really knew what he was talking about,” Dr Sumner said, adding that splitting the atom was a “loose term”.

Major scientific discoveries, he added, attract myths that believe they were created “by one person in a moment”, but extensive research “requires collaboration across national borders”.

A mayor of New Zealand’s South Island said he was “a little surprised” by the President’s claim “whereas that honor belongs to Nelson’s most famous and favorite son, Sir Ernest Rutherford”.

In a post on Facebook, Nelson Mayor Nick Smith clarified that Sir Ernest’s “groundbreaking research on radio communications, radioactivity, the structure of the atom and ultrasound technology” was conducted at universities in Britain, not the US.

He said he would invite Nelson, if appointed US Ambassador to New Zealand, to visit the Lord Rutherford Memorial in Brightwater “so that we can have a historical record of who was the first to split the atom”.

Atoms split naturally, but in 1919, Rutherford observed the first artificially induced nuclear reaction in human history in the laboratories of Victoria University of Manchester.

The experiment involved bombarding a thin sheet of gold foil with alpha particles, and led to Rutherford, of Bridgewater on New Zealand’s South Island, being called “the father of nuclear physics”.

Dr. Sumner said that the reaction Rutherford identified could be more accurately described as the process of an atom “absorbing some material and becoming something heavier.”

At the time, a colleague suggested Rutherford name the process “transmutation”, but the New Zealander rejected the suggestion, because “it seemed as if he had discovered the secrets of alchemy”, its Instead, the word “disintegration” was chosen, Dr. Sumner explained.

“If you’re talking about splitting in the sense of splitting into two equal-sized, or approximately equal-sized, bits, and doing so intentionally, and knowing what’s happening, we’ll get to that a bit later. Gotta go in,” she said.

Rutherford later supervised a team at the University of Cambridge that successfully split atoms in two in 1932.

“There are many different developments that are thought to involve splitting the atom in different senses,” Dr. Sumner said.

“None of them originated in the United States.”