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Scientist in Chemistry Field: Ernest Rutherford Contributions

Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist known as the father of nuclear physics. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on radioactivity and the disintegration of elements. Rutherford discovered radioactive half-life, differentiated alpha and beta radiation, and proved radioactive elements transmute into other elements. In 1911, through his gold foil experiment, he pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom with a small, dense nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. He is also credited with splitting the first atom in 1917.

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295 views3 pages

Scientist in Chemistry Field: Ernest Rutherford Contributions

Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist known as the father of nuclear physics. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on radioactivity and the disintegration of elements. Rutherford discovered radioactive half-life, differentiated alpha and beta radiation, and proved radioactive elements transmute into other elements. In 1911, through his gold foil experiment, he pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom with a small, dense nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. He is also credited with splitting the first atom in 1917.

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SCIENTIST IN CHEMISTRY FIELD

ERNEST RUTHERFORD CONTRIBUTIONS:


The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1908 was awarded to Ernest Rutherford "for his

investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".

Dec 3rd 1904 was described in a Canadian newspaper headline as "all for science, none for self.''

At McGill Rutherford promptly discovered radon, a chemically unreactive but radioactive gas. In this he was assisted by his first research student, Harriet Brookes.Rutherford, with the later help of a young chemist, Frederick Soddy, unravelled the mysteries of radioactivity, showing that some heavy atoms spontaneously decay into slightly lighter atoms. This was the work which first brought him to world attention. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1900 and of Londonin 1903. His first book Radioactivity was published in 1904. In 1908 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry `for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances.' As a bemused Ern often told friends, the fastest transformation he knew of was his transformation from a physicist to a chemist.

WORK DESCRIPTION:
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS[1] (30 August 1871 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. He is considered the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (17911867). 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,[3] proving that the former was essentially helium ions. 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 moved to the Victoria University of Manchester in the UK in 1907 and after he became a Nobel laureate in 1908. In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative;[5] he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus,[6] 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.[7] This led to the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by two students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in 1932. 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.

Ernest Rutherford publishes his atomic theory describing the atom as having a
central positive nucleus surrounded by negative orbiting electrons.

SCIENTIST IN CHEMISTRY FIELD

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