William Sutherland (physicist) - Legacy

Legacy

Sutherland was a well-built man of slightly under medium height, very quiet in manner. He could have been a good musician or a painter if he had been able to give the time. One of the earlier papers to bring Sutherland into notice was on the viscosity of gases which appeared in the Philosophical Magazine in December 1893. Other important papers dealt with the constitution of water, the viscosity of water, molecular attractions and ionization, ionic velocities and atomic sizes. The ordinary reader may refer to a discussion of his scientific work in chapter VI of Osborne's biography of Sutherland, but the full value of it could only be computed by a physicist willing to collate his papers with the state of knowledge at the time each was written. It was well known and valued in England, Germany and America. Professor T. R. Lyle said at the time of Sutherland's death that he was "the greatest authority living in molecular physics". Modest and selfless, Sutherland was content to add to the sum of human knowledge and to hope that another person would carry the work further. Sutherland never married.

Sutherland wrote an equation describing Brownian motion and diffusion which was published in a 1904 paper, which he presented at a Dunedin ANZAAS conference. Albert Einstein’s first published work on the same topic was published in 1905.