Morganeering, Or, The Triumph of the Trust: A Satirical Burlesque on the Worship of Wealth

I’ll begin with a confession: before taking on this review, I’d never even heard of Alexander Bickerton, let alone his only novel, Morganeering. In my defence, he doesn’t rate a mention in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (he lies in the gap between “bibliography” and “Biggs, Bruce”), or even in Lawrence Jones’ encyclopaedic survey of the novel in the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. As Lyman Tower Sargent explains in his thorough introduction, Bickerton was well known during his lifetime, albeit for other reasons than his fiction. As the inaugural professor of physics at Canterbury College, where he taught from 1874 to 1902, he numbered Ernest Rutherford and Ettie Rout among his pupils.

Geologic Time

Geologists first unraveled the geologic time scale by relative age-dating, discussed in the last chapter. Once geologists sorted out the order of rock units, subsequent advances in methodologies, detailed in this chapter, by chronometric and numerical means based on radioisotopes, other atomic measures, and quantitative techniques, were employed to measure time. Many minerals and rocks have “clocks” within them that can be used to pin down the actual age of the particular geologic sample or the age of boundaries between formal units of the geologic time scale. This chapter explains how geologists decipher those clocks and determine the ages of rocks by numerical age-dating. The history of radioisotopes is tracked, starting with Ernest Rutherford and Pierre and Marie Curie. The modern geologic time scale is depicted and expanded upon, along with why it is essential for geologic maps and how the time scale can help with people-sized problems and challenges faced on the Earth.

q-Calculus and the Symmetrized Radioactive Decay Law

The radioactive decay law was first formulated by Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy in 1902. As a well-known law, one of its primary applications is to determine the dates of ancient specimens. The process is known as radiocarbon dating and is subjected to the known properties of radioactive nuclei. In this paper, we implement quantum calculus to express the solution of the radioactive decay equation in symmetrized q-exponential form. Also, we explore a q-analog of the decay constant using Tsallis logarithmic function for various miscellaneous q-values. Furthermore, the factor-label method was applied to our analysis to show that the correct units remained intact under the application of quantum calculus. In conclusion, our work suggests that a variation of the q-parameter was akin to the production of a new isotope for all q in (0,1); the superadditive regime.

The Role of Models in the Discovery of the Nucleus: Ernest Rutherford and his School

Ernest Rutherford is remembered as the scientist who proposed a planetary atomic model that would overcome the atomic structure of the early 20th century, proposed by J.J. Thomson, and based on a volume of positive charge within which the negative charge was considered to be uniformly distributed. Reading Rutherford’s original paper published in 1911—allows us to compare the models of these two physicists and discuss the concept of the model itself.

The Role of Models in the Discovery of the Nucleus: Ernest Rutherford and his School

Ernest Rutherford is remembered as the scientist who proposed a planetary atomic model that would overcome the atomic structure of the early 20th century, proposed by J.J. Thomson, and based on a volume of positive charge within which the negative charge was considered to be uniformly distributed. Reading Rutherford’s original paper published in 1911—allows us to compare the models of these two physicists and discuss the concept of the model itself.