In 1874 Cambridge University created a department of physics—the Cavendish Laboratory—in response to concerns that the UK was lagging behind the European continent in the physical sciences. James Clerk Maxwell was the lab’s first head. In Maxwell’s Enduring Legacy: A Scientific History of the Cavendish Laboratory, astrophysicist Malcolm Longair offers a scientific history of the lab, from its foundation to the present. The illustrious nature of that history is evident from the names of the first few people who succeeded Maxwell: Lord Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, and William Lawrence Bragg.
Longair is well qualified to tell this story. He earned his PhD at the Cavendish in 1967, was named Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy there in 1991, and served as its head from 1997 to 2005. He says his “principal interest is in the content of the physics and how it came about, rather than a history of the personalities, politics, administrative structures, and so on.” That is Longair’s way of distinguishing his book from previous histories. A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 1871–1910 (Longmans, Green, and Co), published in 1910, featured firsthand accounts by nine of the lab’s principal scientists. In 1974 the Cavendish celebrated its centennial and commissioned science journalist James Crowther to write The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874–1974 (Macmillan). Crowther focuses mostly on the administration and politics of the lab and the personalities of those who worked there. A few lines of prose (and no equations) suffice for each highlighted scientific result.
Longair makes good use of that previous work and the memoirs and obituaries that have been published since 1974. His graceful account gives plenty of information about the personalities and politics, but, as promised, it is his treatment of the science that distinguishes his book from its predecessors. For example, an introductory chapter on 19th-century physics carefully outlines William Thomson’s 1855 theory of the telegraph cable. Longair’s in-depth discussion of Thomson’s work is typical of what you’ll find throughout the book; five pages of text, including nine equations and a diagram from Thomson’s original paper, are devoted to his theory.
Among the dozens of topics receiving a similar treatment are the best-known Cavendish achievements: J. J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron, Bragg’s law of diffraction, Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus, James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, the deduction of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson, the discovery of the pulsar by Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish, and Brian Josephson’s prediction of the effect named after him. It is also a delight to learn about the brilliant Cavendish scientists behind less famous discoveries. Among them was G. I. Taylor, who in 1909 observed optical interference using a low-intensity light source, in 1923 demonstrated an instability in the flow of fluid between two rotating cylinders, and in 1950 deduced the energy yield of a US nuclear detonation test from a film of the explosion.
A chronic lack of funds during the laboratory’s first 60 years helped create and reinforce a Cavendish tradition of devising simple but ingenious experiments. That approach changed abruptly after World War II when, for a time, the British government supported physics at unprecedented levels. Nevill Mott succeeded Bragg as head in 1954; during his 17-year tenure, the laboratory doubled in size and focused on materials science, condensed-matter physics, high-energy physics, and radio astronomy. Of course, similar expansion happened at other research centers, which led Mott to remark that the Cavendish had become “one good laboratory among many” in the postwar period.
Readers will notice that Maxwell’s Enduring Legacy changes character as it proceeds from the end of the 20th century into the 21st. The phenomenal accumulation of 23 Nobel Prizes by Cavendish staff ended in 1977, and Longair struggles to find diamonds from among the many research projects completed in the past 40 years. Most readers will find the last quarter of the book slow going.
In the quibble department, Longair, paraphrasing Cavendish physicist Alan Wilson, claims that “there were only three research students working on quantum mechanics in 1927–28: J. A. Gaunt, William McCrea and Wilson himself.” Wilson was technically correct if only research students were being counted. However, those were exactly the years when Cavendish research fellow Douglas Hartree—who earned his PhD at the laboratory in 1926 for work on the old quantum theory—published his seminal papers on the numerical solution of a Schrödinger-like equation for many-electron atoms. It is also inaccurate to say that the fractional quantum Hall effect is “not understood.” Finally, when it comes to lasting influences, the author ought to have mentioned two elegant textbooks based on Cavendish lectures: Elements of Classical Thermodynamics for Advanced Students of Physics (Cambridge University Press, 1957) by former Cavendish head Brian Pippard and Concepts in Solids: Lectures on the Theory of Solids (W. A. Benjamin, 1963) by Philip Anderson.
Despite those small weaknesses, Maxwell’s Enduring Legacy is a useful contribution. Physicists with an interest in the history and scientific achievements of an extraordinarily successful institution will enjoy reading this book.
Andrew Zangwill is a condensed-matter physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He is author of Physics at Surfaces (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Modern Electrodynamics (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In recent years he has turned to researching and writing the history of condensed-matter physics. His current project is a book-length biography of Philip Anderson.
