The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart, Viking/Penguin, £14.99, ISBN 0670883212
THIS is the story of the men who smashed apart the atom. The history books record the names of only John Cockroft (above, left) and Ernest Walton (above, right), but there was a third man: Ernest Rutherford (above, centre), arguably the greatest experimental physicist of the 20th century. Well into his 50s, and way past his most productive years, he gambled everything on Cockroft and Walton delivering him a final, spectacular discovery. He gambled – and he won.
Rutherford’s achievement is all the more remarkable in that he and his young protégés pulled it off…
