Ernest Rutherford’s fame rests on his studies of radiation, radioactive decay, and the structure of the atom. From his first work with Frederick Soddy at McGill University at the turn of the 20th century,Rutherford excelled at the experimental isolation of different “rays” and the identification and characterization of radioactive elements. So how is it that two of his students, Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett and Edward “Teddy” Crisp Bullard—both of whom proved quite adept in Rutherford’s lab at Cambridge University studying nuclear phenomena—made prominent contributions to geophysics? To address the question, one needs to first consider Rutherford and the Cavendish Laboratory in the context of the Earth science that lay in the background of much research done there.
Rutherford and others believed that the heat given off by radioactive elements derailed the arguments that Lord Kelvin had used to support a youthful Earth and to critique Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution...
