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A Force of Nature

The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford

Author: Richard Reeves

Read by: Alex Hyde-White

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At a Glance

Format
Digital Audiobook

Duration
05:08.00

Published: 28th June 2022

Digital Audiobook

$21.99

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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.