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Rutherford,
Ernest, Baron Rutherford of Nelson New Zealand physicist Born: Nelson, New Zealand, August 30, 1871 Died: London, October 19, 1937 | |||||||||
Avogadro Becquerel Bohr Doppler Einstein Geiger Heisenberg Hertz Kirchhoff Planck Roentgen Rutherford Schrodinger |
Rutherford was born and worked on a farm. He showed promise at school and obtained a bursary to attend New Zealand University, where he finished fourth in his class. In 1895, he received a scholarship to Cambridge University. When the news reached him, he was busy digging up potatoes on the farm. Rutherford thus began work in the exciting new field of radioactivity, basing his work upon the discoveries of Becquerel. In 1900, he showed that some radiation was not affected by a magnetic field, these being electromagnetic waves, and he named them gamma rays. He worked with isotopes and showed that these broke down into intermediate elements over a fixed period of time. Rutherford called this fixed period the half-life. Together with his assistant, Geiger, he studied alpha particles intensively and proved conclusively that the individual particle was a helium atom, with its electrons removed. He called this particle a proton. From this, Rutherford developed the theory of the nuclear atom with a positively charged nucleus, containing all the protons of the element, (and therefore virtually all of its mass), and the outer regions of the atom being electrons, negatively charged, and with very little mass. This view of the atom is the commonly accepted one, and it replaced the concept of an indivisible, featureless atom as proposed by Democritus, twenty-three centuries before. In 1917, Rutherford conducted experiments that resulted in his "splitting" the atom for the first time. He was the first man to change one element into another, thus achieving the alchemists dream. He was also the first to create a man-made nuclear reaction, albeit a small one. In recognition of his achievments, Rutherford was made a baron in 1931. | |||||||||
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