# Has anyone here ever heard of frederick soddy? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 24, 2015, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-here-ever-heard-of-frederick-soddy/726019 "2015-07-24T03:46:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2015, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-here-ever-heard-of-frederick-soddy/726019/1 "2015-07-24T03:46:42Z")
He was a nuclear physicist who was active at least as far back as the 1940s: “Soddy noted as far back as 1949 that this simple law of decay, which is the same for all radioactive elements and is of a probabilistic nature, is basically inexplicable. _'It can be imagined in the form of the spirit of destruction, who randomly disintegrates a certain amount of existing atoms at each moment of time, without taking care of the selection of those of them which are close to disintegration_.’” The italicized portion is, I believe, taken from a work translated into Russian and then back again into English. Can anyone verify if it is accurate? ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2015, 10:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-here-ever-heard-of-frederick-soddy/726019/2 "2015-07-24T10:58:51Z")
I don’t know about the quote, but Soddy was a British Nobel Prize winner and his work goes back the the start of the 19th Century. > **[Frederick Soddy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Soddy)** > > Frederick Soddy FRS (2 September 1877 – 22 September 1956) was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements. In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of is Soddy wa... ---
**Author:** ![MikeS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MikeS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MikeS)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2015, 12:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-here-ever-heard-of-frederick-soddy/726019/3 "2015-07-24T12:41:50Z")
Frederick Soddy wrote a book called [“The Story of Atomic Energy”](https://books.google.com/books?id=1H6BXwAACAAJ&dq=soddy+1949&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIpIf-vOTzxgIVAhw-Ch1SLgDr) in 1949, so if you really want to track down the original quote, I would suggest tracking down a copy of that volume. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2015, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-here-ever-heard-of-frederick-soddy/726019/4 "2015-07-24T15:04:55Z")
The metaphor he’s using is just a variant on Maxwell’s Demon, so the spirit of the quote [pun intended] is quite likely what he meant. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2015, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-here-ever-heard-of-frederick-soddy/726019/5 "2015-07-24T15:46:17Z")
Frederick Soddy was the guy whose book gave H.G. Wells the idea for The Atomic Bomb, which he used in his novel _The World Set Free_. This, inn turn, influenced Leo Szilard in his work on chain reactions, which ultimately lead to the real-world atomic bomb. Szilard has stated that it was Wells’ book that showed him the political implications of the real-life atomic bomb.