"Born in colonial New Zealand, fifteen mountain miles away from the nearest town, Ernest Rutherford grew up on the frontier - a different world from Cambridge, to which he won a scholarship at the age of twenty-four. His work overseas revolutionized modern physics. Among his discoveries were the orbital structure of the atom and the concept of the "half-life" of radioactive materials, which led to a massive reevaluation of the age of the Earth, previously judged to be just 100 million years old. 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, was also a great humanist and teacher, coming to the aid of colleagues caught in the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Under his rigorous and boisterous direction, a new generation of remarkable physicists emerged from the famous Cavendish Laboratory. In Richard Reeves's hands, Rutherford comes alive, a ruddy, genial man and a pivotal figure in scientific history."--Jacket.