Mark Meek's Ideas: New Zealand

New Zealand is a country consisting of two main islands, the North Island and the South Island. We know that it is a highly-rated place to live, except that it is just so far away from everything. There are three large cities, and most of the rest of the country consists of mountains and farms and sheep. In the country as a whole, sheep far outnumber people. In New Zealand, the aboriginal people who were there before Europeans are known as Maori.

Did you know that nuclear physics was really begun, and protons discovered, by a New Zealander named Ernest Rutherford? Much of his early work was done at McGill University, that we saw in our visit to "Montreal". Rutherford was the first to notice that there is a nucleus at the center of an atom, and to differentiate between alpha and beta radioactivity. It was also under his direction at Oxford that neutrons were discovered and the first controlled splitting of an atom took place.

(Radioactivity had been discovered by Marie Curie. It was Rutherford, working at Montreal's McGill University, who first differentiated between alpha and beta radioactivity. Montreal really should remember this by having two streets, named Rue Alpha and Rue Beta).

But the most important discovery made by Ernest Rutherford was the proton. The elements may have varying numbers of electrons in their atoms, forming ions, and varying numbers of neutrons, forming isotopes, but the very definition of an element is how many protons it has in the nucleus.

Many people associate Australia and New Zealand together, with the two referred to as the "Anzacs", but there is actually quite a distance between the two countries. The distance from Sydney to Auckland is well over 2,000 km. It is about the distance between New York City and Dallas, or Toronto and Saskatoon, or between London and Bucharest.

This is Ernest Rutherford's birthplace, near the northern tip of the South Island. The first of the following two images, from Google Street View, is the road that is named for Ernest Rutherford.

There are multiple scenes following. To see the scenes, after the first one, you must first click the up arrow, ^, before you can move on to the next scene by clicking the right or forward arrow, >. After clicking the up arrow, you can then hide the previews of successive scenes, if you wish.

https://www.google.com/maps/@-41.3761655,173.111321,3a,75y,136h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s1B-taZA_uRlup6cduylHwg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D1B-taZA_uRlup6cduylHwg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D136.04524%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656

Auckland, in the far north of the North Island, is New Zealand's largest city and economic center. The South Island is the larger in area of the two, but the North Island is by far the most populous. The following scenes begin in the middle of downtown Auckland, next to Aotea Square. The first two images of Aotea Square are from Google Earth.