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Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist known as the father of nuclear physics. He discovered the concept of radioactive half-life and differentiated alpha and beta radiation. In 1911, he postulated that atoms have their positive charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, pioneering the Rutherford model of the atom. He is credited with first "splitting the atom" in 1917 by directing students John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, who split the nucleus in a controlled manner in 1932. Along with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, Rutherford carried out the Geiger-Marsden experiment in 1909 which demonstrated the nuclear nature of atoms and led him to formulate the Rutherford model of the

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113 views2 pages

Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist known as the father of nuclear physics. He discovered the concept of radioactive half-life and differentiated alpha and beta radiation. In 1911, he postulated that atoms have their positive charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, pioneering the Rutherford model of the atom. He is credited with first "splitting the atom" in 1917 by directing students John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, who split the nucleus in a controlled manner in 1932. Along with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, Rutherford carried out the Geiger-Marsden experiment in 1909 which demonstrated the nuclear nature of atoms and led him to formulate the Rutherford model of the

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Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson 

OM, FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937)


was a New Zealand-born British 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. This work was done at McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry he was awarded 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 had moved to
the U.K. in 1907 and was already a Nobel laureate. In 1911, he postulated that atoms have their positive
charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered theRutherford 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. This led to the first experiment to
split the nucleus in a controlled manner, performed by two students working under his direction, John
Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in 1932.

Along with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden he carried out the Geiger–Marsden experiment in 1909,


which demonstrated the nuclear nature of atoms. 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, through 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
positively charged nucleus was orbited by electrons.

In Cambridge in 1919, after taking over the Cavendish laboratory, Rutherford 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 theorised 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.

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