Free mind

If you are in England any time, do go and visit Cambridge and the Cavendish Laboratory where the atom was split for the first time. The man who did it was a farmer's son from New Zealand, a man called Rutherford and he did it in a simple experiment with a few wires and mirrors and a couple of switches, which you can actually touch, nearly a century after the experiment was first performed and which heralded the atomic revolution. Rutherford did it with virtually no technical tools. Einstein's tools, if you can call them that, were paper and pencil, the type school boys use. With that, he built up a whole new universe and turned the world upside down. Go to Berne in Switzerland and walk up a few flights of stairs near the tower and you can actually see the

This article was originally published on November 21, 2021.