George Porter was born in 1920, to John Smith Porter and Alice Ann (Roebuck) Porter in Stainforth, West Yorkshire. He served as a radar specialist during World War II and at the end of the war Porter entered Cambridge University to do graduate work. There he met and studied under Ronald G. W. Norrish, who had pioneered research in the area of photochemical reactions in molecules. Porter received his doctorate from Cambridge in 1949. That year also marked Porter's marriage to Stella Brooke.

Using very short pulses of energy that disturbed the equilibrium of molecules, Porter and Norrish developed a method to study extremely fast chemical reactions lasting for only one-billionth of a second. The technique is known as flash photolysis. First, a flash of short-wavelength light breaks a chemical that is photosensitive into reactive parts. Next, a weaker light flash illuminates the reaction zone, making it possible to measure...