The Search

There was Rutherford himself; Niels Bohr, the Socrates of atomic science, who talked to us amiably one night in his Danish-English for something like two and a half hours; Dirac, of whom I heard it prophesied very early that he would be another Newton: Kapitza, with a bizarre accent and an unreproducible genius; Eddington, who made some of his Carroll-like jokes; and all the rest. English, Americans, Germans, Russians, who were in atomic physics at the time when the search was hottest