J. J. Thomson and the emergence of the Cavendish School, 1885–1990

Abstract

The history of the Cavendish Laboratory is a fascinating subject to study, not just because this famous centre of experimental physics produced a large number of Nobel Laureates but also because it gives us an insight into the unique milieu of the Cambridge physics community. The evolution of the Cavendish Laboratory, however, was not as smooth as might be expected, and the prestige and reputation of its first directors – James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Rayleigh, Joseph John Thomson and Ernest Rutherford – did not automatically guarantee a rosy future. Like other British physics laboratories in the late nineteenth century, the Cavendish Laboratory was a new species to meet the pressure and demand from society. Since it propagated new values and modes of doing science, a struggle with old traditions could not be avoided, and the early history of the Cavendish Laboratory illustrates how the ‘old’ and ‘new’ values fought and negotiated each other in late Victorian Cambridge.

The formation of ionospheric physics – confluence of traditions and threads of continuity

“…The case of Cambridge professor of physics Joseph John Thompson shows how much the mysteries of the upper atmosphere could be revealed in a laboratory setting. Around 1900, Thompson used electrical discharges to recreate physical processes in vacuum tubes and vessels at Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge (Kim, 1995;Crowther, 1926Crowther, , 1974. The streams of electrical particles, in theory irradiated by the Sun and impinging upon the higher atmosphere (thereby forming the aurorae), were those that supposedly appeared in the experiments with ionised gases (Lord Rayleigh, 1941, pp.…”