Matthew Wright

I started 2026 with the intention of writing a blog post a month, or thereabouts.

There’s a new writing scam doing the rounds just now.

It’s been a funny old year, this 2025.

I discover that a while back some of my published work was appropriated by Meta and fed into their AI system.

Mention the name Ernest Rutherford and you might think about splitting atoms, something the straight-talking physicist from Nelson first did during his spare time in 1917-18, blasting particles out of the nucleus of a nitrogen atom.

In the past ten days or so I’ve been involved with a rapid-fire series of interviews and bookshop talks featuring my new book, Ernest Rutherford and the birth of modern physics.

“If you know nothing more about Rutherford than his existence as the man on the hundred dollar note,and some nebulous idea about ‘splitting the atom’, strap in!”

My latest book is being published next week in the United States, Britain, Australia by Scribe and in New Zealand by Oratia.

It’s September, and this is my first blog post for 2025.

Here we are at the end of 2024 already.

My long-standing history of Hawke’s Bay is out this month in new edition.