Soddy, Frederick

[person]

British physicist born in Eastbourne, Sussex (1877-1956). He studied radioactivity with Ernest Rutherford, jointly concluding that radioactivity consisted of atomic disintegration (of parent atoms) and the formation of new kinds of matter (daughter products). Soddy articulated the Displacement Law, which states that an element which emits an alpha particle moves two places back on the Periodic Table. He also came up with the concept of isotopes. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.