ABSTRACT
The radioactive demolition of Kelvin’s six decades of argumentation about the age of the earth began in Paris in 1903 when Madame Curie’s husband Pierre, and his assistant Laborde, discovered that the radioactive element radium maintained itself at a higher temperature than its surroundings. The idea was Soddy’s, conjured up after he had left Rutherford’s Canadian group and returned to England. The astute chemist realized that he could explain a number of puzzling features of radioactivity if atoms were a little more complicated than everybody else thought. The breakthrough came at the University of Cambridge in 1914, where Rutherford was resplendent with a large team, enjoying an enormous reputation, having discovered the atomic nucleus while still at Manchester several years earlier. It was, however, not in Rutherford’s laboratory that isotopes were first detected, but in that of his boss, the brilliant J J Thomson who had discovered the electrons that Rutherford had shown orbited ‘his’ nucleus.
