Sir John Cockcroft

 

We went round the Sellafield exhibition at The Beacon in Whitehaven. Not as wonderfully physicsy as the original on the Sellafield site 30 years ago but much better than its last on-site iteration in the visitor centre which was only aimed at young families. I thought I knew the name John Cockcroft. Turns out he won the Nobel Prize for Physics for inventing a particle accelerator that was the first to "split the atom". I now need to work out how the capacitors and diodes on the Cockcroft-Walton generator work to increase the voltage. In the context of Sellafield, he's seen as the man who saved us all by insisting on the now-iconic filters on the tops of the chimneys.