Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand-born British physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics.[2] Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867).
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 moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium ions. Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford 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 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton.
Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919. Under his leadership the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932 and in the same year the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. After his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium (element 104) was named after him in 1997.
1937 Obituary [1]
The Rt. Hon. Lord RUTHERFORD, O.M., LL.D., D.Sc., Ph.D., M.A., who was elected an Honorary Member of the Institution in 1934, in recognition of his distinguished contributions to physical science, was born near Nelson, New Zealand, in 1871. After a brilliant career at Canterbury College, Christchurch, he was in 1894 awarded a scholarship by the Commissioners of the 1851 Exhibition, and came to England, where he studied under Professor (afterwards Sir) J. J. Thomson, Hon. M.I.Mech.E. His early work consisted in investigating the effect of oscillating currents upon a highly magnetized needle, which he used in designing a remarkable detector of electric waves. About the year 1897 he commenced his famous researches on radio-activity, which were stimulated by Professor Thomson's experiments on electrical discharges through gases, and extended the work to include first, the ionization of gases produced by X-rays, and finally the radio-active effects produced by the rays discovered by Becquerel.
In 1898 he was appointed Macdonald Professor of Physics at McGill University, Montreal; he was subsequently invited to occupy the Langworthy Chair of Physics in the University of Manchester, and returned to England in 1907. Here he carried out some of his most important experimental work in establishing his theory of atomic structure. In 1919 he was appointed Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge. His greatest work during the succeeding years was in his researches on radium emanation and the structural relationship of the elements, leading up to the new conception of the "transmutation of the elements."
Lord Rutherford, who was knighted in 1914, was created Baron Rutherford of Nelson, of Cambridge, in 1931. Scientific and technical societies throughout the world accorded him their highest honours in recognition of his brilliant experimental work and his revolutionary deductions in physical science. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1908, the Rumford and Copley Medals of the Royal Society, and the Faraday Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, of which he was an Honorary Member. In 1925 the Order of Merit was conferred upon him, and in the same year he was elected President of the Royal Society, an office which he filled until 1930. He was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, London, in 1927, in succession to Professor Sir J. J. Thomson.
The details of his work were published in numerous papers before the Royal Society, and in various scientific journals, and he was the author of several books on radio-activity, published over a period of more than thirty years. In 1932 Lord Rutherford delivered the Nineteenth Thomas Hawksley Lecture to the Institution, on the subject of "Atomic Projectiles and their Applications." His death occurred at Cambridge on 19th October 1937.
1937 Obituary [2]