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A Meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society was held in the Great. Hall of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Great George Street, Westminster, London, S.W.1, on Wednesday, 19th December, 1945, at which a paper by Professor N. Feather, Ph.D., F.R.S., entitled “ Atomic Disintegration ” was presented and discussed. In the Chair, the President, Sir Frederick Handley Page, C.B.E.
The idea of the disintegration of the atom appeared first—as a notion seriously entertained by a scientist of repute—in the hypothesis put forward by Rutherford and Soddy in 1903, in an attempt to explain the phenomena of radioactivity as known at that time.
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Note on Page 558 * “ Charge number ” is used synonymously with “ atomic number ” to indicate the number of unit positive charges on the nucleus (v. sup.); mass number is the physicist's equivalent to the “ atomic weight ” of the chemist (v. inf.).
Note on Page 559 * The process of emission of a β-particle (negative electron) from a nucleus might appear at first sight to be less satisfactorily covered by the neutron-proton hypothesis. The problem cannot be entered into here, but it should be said that the current view is that the electron escapes in a type of “ internal ” transformation in which a nuclear neutron simultaneously changes into a proton (which remains in the nucleus).
Note on Page 563 * Space, is not available in this article for a discussion of the general question of “ artificial ” radioactivity. Suffice to say here that the products of nuclear transformation are, more frequently than not, unstable (radioactive) isotopes of the common elements which subsequently transform into stable species by the emission of electrons (β-particles and positive electrons).