The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom.(book by Brian Cathcart Farrar)(Book Review)

Publication: Natural History

Publication Date: 01-JUN-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.

The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom by Brian Cathcart Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005; $25.00

For a man who admits he never took a class in physics, Brian Cathcart certainly knows how to turn great science into arresting drama. The scene is the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, in the late 1920s. Scientists, just beginning to unlock the secrets of the atom, had been astonished almost two decades earlier by the discovery that matter is mostly empty space; orbiting the nucleus of each atom, like a system of miniature moons, is a cloud of electrons, particles...

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