The Fly in the Cathedral Brian Cathcart Viking, 308pp, £14.99 ISBN 0670883212

A remarkable photo in this book shows 40 men and women in Brussels in October 1933. They include a frail Marie Curie, who died soon afterwards of leukaemia, her lover and collaborator Paul Langevin, her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie and Irene's husband Frederic Joliot, the Dane Niels Bohr and his pupil and rival Werner Heisenberg (stars of Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen), plus Schrodinger, Pauli, Fermi, Rutherford, Chadwick. These names would leap off the pages of any science textbook. Half the group were or would become Nobel laureates. Tucked at the back, looking a little abashed in such glorious company, are 30-year-old Ernest Walton and his Cambridge collaborator John Cockcroft. Yet they were the winners in the race to smash the atom.

Strictly speaking, they smashed the nucleus, and did not realise quite what they had achieved until the sums were added up. Li + H - 2He is how the result was whispered over tea a few days later. A lithium nucleus, atomic weight 7, had been bombarded by a proton (atomic weight 1 - it's the nucleus of a hydrogen atom). Both vanished. Flung out instead were two alpha particles (weight 4 each - these are nuclei of helium) plus a staggering quantity of energy, the like of which had never been seen: a violent reaction calculated at 16 million volts. Among other breakthroughs, this was the first physical confirmation of Einstein's equation of energy and matter E = mc=.

Brian Cathcart is, like Walton, an Irishman. He readily admits he has never had a physics lesson in his life - his recent publications include The Case of Stephen Lawrence and Jill Dando: her life and death. His explanations are all the clearer for that, and should not trouble even the scientifically illiterate. He has a nose for a great story, which is told as one of supreme human endeavour, of men and women pitting intelligence against nature, striving to increase our meagre knowledge of the world. In these irrational, scientifically ignorant days, it is refreshing to see laid bare both the process and the honourable motives behind this quest.

They were hardly classic Cambridge types: Walton was from County Waterford, Cockcroft a 36-year-old from Todmorden. The Nobel prize belongs to them because of their persistence and skill in making their Heath Robinson particle accelerator work, and not getting killed in the process. At the great Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, they laboured under a true Edwardian, Ernest Rutherford.

A student described Rutherford as "a large, rather florid man . . . who reminded me forcibly of the keeper of a general store and post office". Paul Langevin called him a "force of nature". James Chadwick, another Nobel prize-winner, said: "His mind was like the bow of a battleship. There was so much weight behind it, it had no need to be sharp as a razor." He is the towering hero of this book.

For Rutherford, a New Zealander by birth, it was the culmination of a journey that began in Manchester in the balmy days of 1909. He had just won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that the atom, rather than being solid, was mostly empty space. That meant the nucleus was a mere speck in a cavernous void - like a "fly in a cathedral". This raised the question of what the nucleus itself was made of, and to find out one had to get inside it. The fly, however, proved elusive. Not until 1932, when the Sorbonne team led by Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie bombarded beryllium with polonium and carefully reported the results, did puzzling effects appear. The genius of the Cambridge men was that they didn't believe the explanations. Once they set out to repeat the experiments, and tried simpler atoms, they hit the jackpot and very quickly understood what they were seeing.

Many of the descriptions make one's hair stand on end. Radioactive material was fortunately scarce, or more would have died. If you lost any, there were no Geiger counters (their development is part of the story). The equipment, consisting of glass baubles held together at one point by child's Plasticine, was almost laughable. The Americans demonstrated theirs on a hillside to the consternation of passers-by. One trio even tried to emulate Benjamin Franklin by harnessing the power of lightning.

International competition was intense, yet this was also a world of sunlit teas on the lawn and white tennis trousers, courtships by letter and transport by bicycle. The atomic bomb still belonged in the realm of science fiction. When Walton and Cockcroft's discovery was announced, the popular press forecast the dangers far better than the scientists themselves. Rutherford was apoplectic, and it is perhaps fortunate that he never lived to see the mushroom clouds.

Edwina Currie's novel Chasing Men is shortly to be reissued by Little, Brown

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