was born August 30, 1871, in Spring Grove, New Zealand. A pioneer of nuclear physics and the first to split the atom, Rutherford was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of atomic structure. Dubbed the “Father of the Nuclear Age,” Rutherford died in Cambridge, England, on October 19, 1937 of a strangulated hernia Ernest Rutherford was born in rural Spring Grove, on the South Island of New Zealand on August 30, 1871. He was the fourth of 12 children, and the second son. His father, James, had little education and struggled to support the large family on a flax-miller’s income. Ernest’s mother, Martha, worked as a schoolteacher. She believed that knowledge was power, and placed a strong emphasis on her children’s education. As a child, Ernest, whose family called him “Ern,” spent most of his time after school milking cows and helping with other chores on the family farm. Weekends were spent swimming in the creek with his brothers. Since money was tight, Rutherford found inventive ways of overcoming his family’s financial challenges, including birds-nesting to earn funds for his kite-flying supplies. “We haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think,” was Rutherford’s motto at the time. At the age of 10, Rutherford was handed his first science book, at Foxhill School. It was a pivotal moment for Rutherford, given that the book inspired his very first scientific experiment. The young Rutherford constructed a miniature cannon, which, to his family’s surprise, promptly and unexpectedly exploded. Despite the outcome, Rutherford’s interest in academics remained unfaltering. In 1887 he was awarded a scholarship to attend Nelson Collegiate School, a private secondary school where he would board and play rugby until 1889. In 1890 Rutherford landed another scholarship—this time to Canterbury College in Christchurch, New Zealand. At Canterbury College, Rutherford’s professors fueled his enthusiasm for seeking concrete proof through scientific experimentation. Rutherford obtained both his Bachelor of Arts and his Master of Arts degrees there, and managed to achieve first-class honors in math and science. In 1894, still at Canterbury, Rutherford conducted independent research on the ability of high-frequency electrical discharge to magnetize iron. His research earned him a Bachelor of Science degree in just one year’s time. During that same year, Rutherford met and fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, Mary Newton. The couple married in 1900 and later welcomed a daughter, whom they named Eileen. The Rutherford model was devised by Ernest Rutherford to describe an atom. Rutherford directed the famous Geiger–Marsden experiment in 1909 which suggested, upon Rutherford's 1911 analysis, that J. J. Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom was incorrect. Rutherford's new model[1] for the atom, based on the experimental results, contained new features of a relatively high central charge concentrated into a very small volume in comparison to the rest of the atom and with this central volume also containing the bulk of the atomic mass of the atom. This region would be known as the "nucleus" of the atom. Rutherford overturned Thomson's model in 1911 with his well-known gold foil experiment in which he demonstrated that the atom has a tiny and heavy nucleus. Rutherford designed an experiment to use the alpha particles emitted by a radioactive element as probes to the unseen world of atomic structure. If Thomson was correct, the beam would go straight through the gold foil. Most of the beams went through the foil, but a few were deflected Rutherford presented his own physical model for subatomic structure, as an interpretation for the unexpected experimental results. In it, the atom is made up of a central charge (this is the modern atomic nucleus, though Rutherford did not use the term "nucleus" in his paper) surrounded by a cloud of (presumably) orbiting electrons. In this May 1911 paper, Rutherford only committed himself to a small central region of very high positive or negative charge in the atom. Gold foil experiment
Rutherford performed his most famous work after
receiving the Nobel prize in 1908. Along with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909, he carried out the Geiger–Marsden experiment, which demonstrated the nuclear nature of atoms by deflecting alpha particles passing through a thin gold foil. Rutherford was inspired to ask Geiger and Marsden in this experiment to look for alpha particles with very high deflection angles, of a type not expected from any theory of matter at that time. Such deflections, though rare, were found, and proved to be a smooth but high-order function of the deflection angle. It was Rutherford's interpretation of this data that led him to formulate the Rutherford model of the atom in 1911 – that a very small charged[9] nucleus, containing much of the atom's mass, was orbited by low-mass electrons. In 1919–1920, Rutherford found that nitrogen and other light elements ejected a proton (Rutherford said "a hydrogen atom" rather than "a proton") when hit with α (alpha) particles.[33] This result showed Rutherford that hydrogen nuclei were a part of nitrogen nuclei (and by inference, probably other nuclei as well). Such a construction had been suspected for many years on the basis of atomic weights which were whole numbers of that of hydrogen; see Prout's hypothesis. Hydrogen was known to be the lightest element, and its nuclei presumably the lightest nuclei. Now, because of all these considerations, Rutherford decided that a hydrogen nucleus was possibly a fundamental building block of all nuclei, and also possibly a new fundamental particle as well, since nothing was known from the nucleus that was lighter. Thus, confirming and extending the work of Wilhelm Wien who in 1898 discovered the proton in streams of ionized gas,[34] Rutherford postulated the hydrogen nucleus to be a new particle in 1920, which he dubbed the proton. Rutherford's theory of neutrons was proved in 1932 by his associate James Chadwick, who recognized neutrons immediately when they were produced by other scientists and later himself, in bombarding beryllium with alpha particles. In 1935, Chadwick was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. How did Rutherford make gold foil?
Ernest Rutherford hypothesized that an
atom's mass was uniformly spread out in its shape. In the Gold Foil Experiment he shot alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold; he thought the particles would travel right through the sheet, rather like a bullet traveling through a sand bag.