Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson was a New Zealand-born

British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics Encyclopaedia
britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael. He also spent a
substantial amount of his career abroad, in both Canada and the United America.
In early work, Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, the radioactive element
radon and differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation . This work was performed at
McGill university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel prize of chemistry he
was awarded in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the
chemistry of radioactive substances", for which he was the first Oceanian Nobel laureate, and
the first to perform the awarded work in Canada. In 1904, he was elected as a member to
the Americian philosophical society.
Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester in the UK, where he
and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei. 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 scattring by the gold foil experiment of hans geiger and
ernest marsden. He performed the first artificially induced nuclear reaction in 1917 in
experiments where nitrogen nuclei were bombarded with alpha particles. As a result, he
discovered the emission of a subatomic particle which, in 1919, he called the "hydrogen atom"
but, in 1920, he more accurately named the proton.
Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge 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 was performed by
students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. After his death in 1937,
he was buried in Westminster Abbey near Sir Isaac Newton. The chemical element rutherfordium
was named after him in 1997.
He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study
at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand, where he participated in the debating
society and played rugby. After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of research
during which he invented a new form of radio receiver, in 1895 Rutherford was awarded an 1851
Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, to travel to England
for postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He was among the
first of the 'aliens' (those without a Cambridge degree) allowed to do research at the university,
under the leadership of J. J. Thomson, which aroused jealousies from the more conservative
members of the Cavendish fraternity. With Thomson's encouragement, he managed to detect
radio waves at half a mile and briefly held the world record for the distance over which
electromagnetic waves could be detected, though when he presented his results at the British
Association meeting in 1896, he discovered he had been outdone by Guglielmo Marconi, who
was also lecturing.
In 1898, Thomson recommended Rutherford for a position at McGill University in Montreal,
Canada. He was to replace Hugh Longbourne Callendar who held the chair of Macdonald
Professor of physics and was coming to Cambridge. Rutherford was accepted, which meant that
in 1900 he could marry Mary Georgina Newton to whom he had become engaged before leaving
New Zealand; they married at St Paul's Anglican Church, Papanui in Christchurch, they had one
daughter, Eileen Mary, who married the physicist Ralph Fowler. In 1901, Rutherford gained
a DSc from the University of New Zealand. In 1907, he returned to Britain to take the chair of
physics
Rutherford was knighted in 1914. During World War I, he worked on a top secret project to solve
the practical problems of submarine detection by sonar. In 1916, he was awarded the Hector
Memorial Medal. In 1919, he returned to the Cavendish succeeding J. J. Thomson as the
Cavendish professor and Director. Under him, Nobel Prizes were awarded to James
Chadwick for discovering the neutron (in 1932), John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton for an
experiment which was to be known as splitting the atom using a particle accelerator, and Edward
Appleton for demonstrating the existence of the ionosphere. In 1925, Rutherford pushed calls to
the New Zealand Government to support education and research, which led to the formation of
the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in the following year. Between 1925
and 1930, he served as President of the Royal Society, and later as president of the Academic
Assistance Council which helped almost 1,000 university refugees from Germany. He was
appointed to the Order of Merit in the 1925 New Year Honoursand raised to the peerage
as Baron Rutherford of Nelson, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridge in 1931, a title that
became extinct upon his unexpected death in 1937. In 1933, Rutherford was one of the two
inaugural recipients of the T. K. Sidey Medal, set up by the Royal Society of New Zealand as an
award for outstanding scientific research.

For some time before his death, Rutherford had a small hernia, which he had neglected to have
fixed, and it became strangulated, causing him to be violently ill. Despite an emergency operation
in London, he died four days afterwards of what physicians termed "intestinal paralysis", at
Cambridge. After cremation at Golders Green Crematorium, he was given the high honour of
burial in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton and other illustrious British scientists.