Stories by Lawrence Badash

The controversy, which embroiled Archbishop Ussher, James Hutton, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, Bertram Boltwood and Arthur Holmes, has "aged" the earth 4.5 billion years during the past three centuries

The startling announcement in 1902 of the Rutherford-Soddy theory of the transmutation of elements by radioactive decay met surprisingly little opposition. A historian of science examines this curious reception