Kapitza Club

In October 1946, Professor D. R. Hartree moved from his Chair of Mathematics at the University of Manchester to become Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge and to head up the Mathematical Laboratory there. He knew Lennard-Jones, for he had been a member of the Kapitza club in 1924-25, when Lennard-Jones was also a member. (He was then just plain Jones, the Lennard was added in 1925 upon his marriage to Kathleen Mary Lennard.) Among the other members of the club that year were P. A. M. Dirac, L. H. Thomas, and P. M. S. Blackett. 

That Wednesday Kapitza wined and dined the exhausted Chadwick into what Mark Oliphant calls a very mellow mood, then brought him along to a Kapitza Club meeting. The intense excitement of all in the Cavendish, including Rutherford, Oliphant remembers, was already remarkable, for we had heard rumors of Chadwick s results. Oliphant says Chadwick spoke lucidly and with conviction, not failing to mention the contributions of Bothe, Becker, Webster and the Joliot-Curies, a lesson to us all. C. P. Snow, who was also present, remembers the performance as one of the shortest accounts ever made about a major discovery. When tall and birdlike Chadwick finished speaking he looked over the assembly and announced abruptly, Now I want to be chloroformed and put to bed for a fortnight. ... 

That Wednesday the Kapitza Club traditionally met on Tuesday, but I take it that Chadwick finished the first intense phase of his work with the writing of his letter to Nature dated this day, Feb. 17, 1932. His remark about wanting to be chloroformed (see below) indicates he had not yet rested from his ten-day marathon. 

In a long letter published in Nature, and aiming at wider audiences, Fowler (1927, 241) explained the conceptual and mathematical differences between matrix and wave mechanics, noting that "however abstract the new mechanics may yet seem to us, however incomplete our grasp of its fundamental principles, it is impossible to overestimate its value to theoretical physics." Fowler introduced problems of quantum theory into the discussions of the experimentally oriented physicists who were at the Cavendish Laboratory, the Kapitza Club, and the Del-squared V Club. Mott noted that he was a model of what a mathematical physicist cooperating with the Cavendish Laboratory ought to be—"someone who knows what the experimental work is and... 

---