ERNEST RUTHERFORD

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS (30 August 1871–19 October
1937) was a British-New Zealand chemist and physicist who became known as the father of
nuclear physics. In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half life, proved that
radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also
differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of
radioactive substances".

Rutherford performed his most famous work after he received this prize. In 1911, he postulated
that atoms have their positive charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered
the Rutherford model, or planetary, model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation
of Rutherford scattering in his gold foil experiment. He is widely credited with first splitting the
atom in 1917, and leading the first experiment to "split the nucleus" in a controlled manner by
two students under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in 1932.

Biography
Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson,
originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England.[4] James had emigrated from Perth, Scotland, "to
raise a little flax and a lot of children". Ernest was born at Spring Grove (now Brightwater), near
Nelson, New Zealand. His first name was mistakenly spelled Earnest when his birth was
registered.[5]

He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at
Canterbury College, University of New Zealand where he was president of the debating society,
among other things. After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of research at the
forefront of electrical technology, in 1895 Rutherford travelled to England for postgraduate study
at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge (1895–1898),[6] and he briefly held the
world record for the distance over which electromagnetic waves could be detected.

In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to the chair of physics at McGill University in Montreal,
Canada, where he did the work that gained him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. In 1900 he
gained a DSc from the University of New Zealand. Also in 1900 he married Mary Georgina
Newton (1876–1945); they had one daughter, Eileen Mary (1901–1930), who married Ralph
Fowler. In 1907 Rutherford moved to Britain to take the chair of physics at the University of
Manchester.

Later years

He was knighted in 1914. In 1916 he was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal. In 1919 he
returned to the Cavendish as Director. Under him, Nobel Prizes were awarded to Chadwick for
discovering the neutron (in 1932), Cockcroft and Walton for an experiment which was to be
known as splitting the atom using a particle accelerator, and Appleton for demonstrating the
existence of the ionosphere. He was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1925 and raised to the
peerage as Baron Rutherford of Nelson, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridge, in 1931,[7]
a title that became extinct upon his unexpected death in hospital following an operation for an
umbilical hernia (1937). Since he was a peer, British protocol at that time required that he be
operated on by a titled doctor, and the delay cost him his life.[8] He is interred in Westminster
Abbey, alongside J. J. Thomson, and near Sir Isaac Newton.

Scientific research
During the investigation of radioactivity he coined the terms alpha and beta in 1899 to describe
the two distinct types of radiation emitted by thorium and uranium. These rays were
differentiated on the basis of penetrating power. From 1900 to 1903 he was joined at McGill by
the young Frederick Soddy (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1921) and they collaborated on research
into the transmutation of elements. Rutherford had demonstrated that radioactivity was the
spontaneous disintegration of atoms. He noticed that a sample of radioactive material invariably
took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay—its "half-life"—and created a
practical application using this constant rate of decay as a clock, which could then be used to
help determine the age of the Earth, which turned out to be much older than most of the scientists
at the time believed.

In 1903, Rutherford realized that a type of radiation from radium discovered (but not named) by
French chemist Paul Villard in 1900, must represent something different from alpha rays and
beta rays, due to its very much greater penetrating power. Rutherford gave this third type of
radiation its name also: the gamma ray.

In Manchester he continued to work with alpha radiation, in conjunction with Hans Geiger he
developed zinc sulfide scintillation screens and ionization chambers to count alphas. By dividing
the total charge they produced by the number counted, Rutherford decided that the charge on the
alpha was two. In late 1907 Rutherford Thomas Royds allowed alphas to penetrate a very thin
window into an evacuated tube. As they sparked the tube into discharge, the spectrum obtained
from it changed, as the alphas were trapped. Eventually, the clear spectrum of helium gas
appeared, proving that alphas were at least ionized helium atoms, and probably helium nuclei.

Along with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden he carried out the Geiger–Marsden experiment in
1909, which demonstrated the nuclear nature of atoms. It was his interpretation of this
experiment that led him to formulate the Rutherford model of the atom in 1911 — that a very
small positively charged nucleus was orbited by electrons. In Cambridge in 1919 he became the
first person to transmute one element into another when he converted nitrogen into oxygen
through the nuclear reaction 14N + α → 17O + p. In 1921, while working with Niels Bohr (who
postulated that electrons moved in specific orbits), Rutherford theorized about the existence of
neutrons, which could somehow compensate for the repelling effect of the positive charges of
protons by causing an attractive nuclear force and thus keeping the nuclei from breaking apart.
Rutherford's theory of neutrons was proved in 1932 by his associate James Chadwick, who in
1935 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.