The mayor of a small town in New Zealand has started a nuclear battle with Donald Trump, after the recently sworn-in US president praised US scientists for splitting the atom.
Inaugural speech of Mr. Trump he rattled off a list of crowning American achievements such as ending slavery, launching into space and the moment they “split the atom.”
The mayor of Nelson on New Zealand’s South Island has seized on subatomic insignificance, pointing out that work on splitting atoms was actually started by Kiwi-born physicist Ernest Rutherford.
“I was a bit surprised by new President Donald Trump in his inaugural speech about the greatness of the USA claiming that today Americans are ‘splitting the atom’ when that honor belongs to Nelson’s most famous and favorite son, Sir Ernest Rutherford,” Mayor Nick Smith she wrote on social networks.
Credited with splitting the nucleus of an atom during experiments at the University of Manchester in Great Britain in 1917, Rutherford was “the first to artificially induce a nuclear reaction by bombarding nitrogen nuclei with alpha particles,” Smith said.
He added that he would invite the future US ambassador to visit the Rutherford Memorial in Nelson, population 50,000, “so we can keep the historical record accurate as to who first split the atom.”
Ben Uffindell, editor of a satirical New Zealand news website called The Civilian, also weighed in on Mr Trump’s claim.
“Okay, I have to delay. Trump just claimed America split the atom. That’s the ONLY THING WE’VE DONE,” Uffindell she wrote on social networks.
Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images
Widely regarded as the “father of nuclear physics”, Rutherford won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for his earlier work on radioactivity.
While Rutherford is credited with the initial splitting of the atom, Englishman John Cockcroft and Irishman Ernest Walton later performed the first controlled experiment in splitting an atomic nucleus, according to US Department of Energy.
Rutherford remains one of New Zealand’s most famous sons, and his face still graces the country’s $100 bill.
