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A Force of Nature

The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford

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A new intellectual biography of Ernest Rutherford, the twentieth century’s greatest experimental physicist.

Ernest Rutherford, who grew up in colonial New Zealand and came to Cambridge on a scholarship, made numerous revolutionary discoveries, among them the orbital structure of the atom and the concept of the “half-life” of radioactive materials, which led to a massive re-evaluation of the age of the Earth―previously judged just 100 million years old. Above all, perhaps, Rutherford and the young men working under him were the first to split the atom, unlocking tremendous forces―forces, as Rutherford himself predicted, that would bring us the atomic bomb.

Rutherford, awarded a Nobel Prize and made Baron Rutherford by the queen of England, was also a great ambassador of science, coming to the aid of colleagues caught in the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Under Rutherford’s rigorous and boisterous direction, a whole new generation of remarkable physicists emerged. In Richard Reeves’s hands, Rutherford leaps off the page, a ruddy, genial man and a towering figure in scientific history.

©2008 Richard Reeves (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing History History & Philosophy Physics Professionals & Academics Science Science & Technology
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if, like me, you know nothing of his life it is a good introduction to him and his work. if you know him and his work you'll get little from it.

the narrator utterly ruins the book by doing silly voices built on lazy stereotypes

interesting, if superficial, look at his life

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