The Basis of Everything: Before Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project there was the Cavendish Laboratory - the remarkable story of the scientific friendships that changed the world foreverCentered on the inter war years within the ivy clad walls of Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory, amid the windswept valleys of north Wales, and in the industrial heartland of Birmingham The Basis of Everything is the story of the coming of the atomic bomb, and how the unlikely union of two scientists Ernest Rutherford, the son of a New Zealand farmer, and Mark Oliphant, a peace loving vegetarian from a tiny Australian hills village