Truly living a life rooted in passion, as I have increasingly found, requires extraordinary resilience.
Since Rutherford's discovery, particle physics has provided one extraordinary — if increasingly implausible-sounding — revelation after another: first protons and neutrons, then antimatter, gluons, neutrinos, and quarks.
But another, bigger, reason is the extraordinary and increasingly misplaced loyalty that so many French voters have to the so-called "French exception", and their corresponding suspicion of the supposedly brutal capitalism prevalent in the United States and Britain.
In the profoundly conservative world of Formula One, millions of TV viewers were increasingly preoccupied with an extraordinary duel developing between two drivers: the glamorous swashbuckler from Britain, James Hunt, and the icily correct Austrian Niki Lauda.
But as Donald J Trump approaches his date with destiny, actors are increasingly drawn to this extraordinary character: the hair, the hands, the hair, the suit, the hair, the voice, the hair, the tie, the hair.
The selection of Jörg Asmussen, 44, a deputy finance minister and career bureaucrat, announced at the meeting of Group of 7 countries in Marseille, France, appeared intended to reassure a German public increasingly concerned about the extraordinary lengths that the central bank has gone to support ailing countries like Greece and Spain.
If so you're also probably now well versed in the ways of this type of bloke – the slightly pudgy everyman to whom truly extraordinary and increasingly improbable events occur purely as a result of an inability to control his gambling impulses.
"Ultimately, if the Republicans want to play the same game, since they control the state legislature overwhelmingly, they can just decide to name the electors on their own," he said, quickly ticking off a series of extraordinary but increasingly possible steps that then might leave the final choice to Congress.
But outside that life, he increasingly finds himself capable of extraordinary acts of aggression and then violence.
The final tragic years in which the jewel of his extraordinary memory became increasingly destroyed by terrible illness robbed him - and probably the nation - of an opportunity to demonstrate a matured wisdom that, undoubtedly, was there.
