The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

It was a hard and healthy childhood. Rutherford capped it by winning scholarships, first to modest Nelson College in nearby Nelson, South Island, then to the University of New Zealand, where he earned an M.A. with double firsts in mathematics and physical science at twenty-two. He was sturdy, enthusiastic and smart, qualities he would need to carry him from rural New Zealand to the leadership of British science. Another, more subtle quality, a braiding of country-boy acuity with a profound frontier innocence, was crucial to his unmatched lifetime record of physical discovery. As his protégé James Chadwick said, Rutherford’s ultimate distinction was “his genius to be astonished.” He preserved that quality against every assault of success and despite a well-hidden but sometimes sickening insecurity, the stiff scar of his colonial birth.111, 112