Daniel Lin Yu Hung (04) 2A3

Ernest Rutherford, born on 30 August 1871 in Brightwater, New Zealand; died on 19 October 1937 at
the age of 66 in Cambridge, England.

He is a physicist and a chemist, who discovered nuclear physics, the Rutherford scattering which
leads to the Rutherford model, the discovery of proton, the naming of Gamma rays. People made
his name into units to recognise his achievements.

Rutherford demonstrated that radioactivity was the spontaneous disintegration of atoms. In 1919
Rutherford proved that the hydrogen nucleus is present in other nuclei. He did a test and when
alpha particles were shot into nitrogen gas, his scintillation detectors showed the hydrogen nuclei.
Rutherford knew that this hydrogen could only have come from the nitrogen, and so the nitrogen
must have contained hydrogen nuclei. The hydrogen nucleus is also present in other nuclei as
elementary particles. Rutherford named it the proton, after Greek word.

During his time, great machines were being invented one by one and when he grew up, the
advanced technology allowed him to conduct new experiments with results unclear or undiscovered.
Also at that time, because of the great jump in technology, scientist discovered one thing after
another, and one of the scientists behind this major change would be him.

His atomic theory (or rather the famous gold foil test that he had done) describes atoms having a
central positive nucleus surrounded by negative electrons orbiting around it. So today, we all
understand that an atom is made up of empty spaces.