01 Biography
Ernest Rutherford was born in rural New Zealand in 1871 and became the most important experimental physicist of his era. Working at Cambridge and McGill University, he distinguished alpha and beta radiation (1898), discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, and showed that radioactivity transforms one element into another - overturning the ancient belief in the immutability of elements. His gold foil experiment (1909) with Geiger and Marsden revealed that the atom has a tiny, dense nucleus surrounded by mostly empty space. In 1917, he became the first person to deliberately split the atom by bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908, joking that his "instantaneous transformation" into a chemist was the most surprising transmutation he had observed.
02 Key Achievements
03 Notable Quote
"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."
04 Legacy
Rutherfordium (element 104) is named after him. His nuclear model of the atom is the foundation on which all of modern physics and chemistry is built. He mentored an extraordinary number of Nobel laureates, including Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, and Cecil Powell.