Chapter 3
AN ENIGMA, A SUBJECT OF PROFOUND ASTONISHMENT
I
t would be more accurate to say, by the first decade of the twentieth century, that science had amassed a surfeit of atoms, all doing distinct jobs and with no clear kinship between them. Of some standing were the chemists’ atoms, the indivisible units of matter that participated in reactions and joined together to form molecules. Not quite as venerable were the physicists’ kinetic atoms, those prototypical billiard balls that in their random crashing around gave substance to the laws of heat. Between these two atoms, from a theoretical perspective, there was essentially no point of contact. And in 1896 a new task had been piled onto the already overburdened atom. Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity offers eloquent testimony to the power of serendipity. On the first day of January
