Richard Reeves on J. J. Thomson

“Notes on Recent Researches in Electricity and Magnetism, published in 1883, had won him enough acclaim at the age of twenty-seven that he was named director of the [Cavendish] laboratory the next year.”

“Thomson and then his young men demolished a recurrent scientific myth—one that had surfaced again in the 1870's: that there was nothing left to be discovered, nothing new under the sun. Part of the immutable wisdom of the day, endorsed and believed long before the greatest of scientists, Isaac Newton, was a kind of billiard ball theory of the atom, which went back to the ancient Greeks. The word itself is from the Greek atomos, meaning "inidivisible."”