The English chemist Ronald G. W. Norrish spent his academic life studying reaction kinetics, a discipline in chemistry concerned with rates of chemical reactions and factors influencing those rates. Norrish received the 1967 Nobel Prize for Chemistry--which he shared with a former student, George Porter, and German scientist Manfred Eigen --for his work in this realm. A pioneer researcher in flash photolysis (chemical reactions induced by intense bursts of light), Norrish developed a process which allowed minute intermediate stages of a chemical reaction to be measured and described. He also contributed to chemistry an understanding of chain reactions, combustion, and polymerization (the formation of large molecules from numerous smaller ones). Over his career, Norrish was awarded the Liversidge Medal of the Chemical Society and the Davy Medal of the Royal Society, both in 1958, and the Bernard Lewis Gold Medal from the Combustion Institute in 1964. In addition, he was a...