Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM,  (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand-born British chemistand physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. 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".

Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England.James had emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland, "to raise a little flax and a lot of children". Ernest was born at Spring Grove (nowBrightwater), near Nelson, New Zealand. His first name was mistakenly spelled Earnest when his birth was registered.

Rutherford performed his most famous work after he had moved to the UK in 1907 and was already a Nobel laureate. In 1911, he theorized that atoms have their positive 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 anuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton. 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 inWestminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium (element 104) was named for 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 was president of the debating society, among other things. After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of research at the forefront of electrical technology, in 1895 Rutherford travelled to England for postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge(1895–1898), and he briefly held the world record for the distance over which electromagnetic waves could be detected.

In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to succeed Hugh Longbourne Callendar in the chair of Macdonald Professor of physics at McGill University inMontreal, Canada, where he did the work that gained him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. In 1900 he gained a DSc from the University of New Zealand. Also in 1900 he married Mary Georgina Newton (1876–1945); they had one daughter, Eileen Mary (1901–1930), who married Ralph Fowler. In 1907 Rutherford moved to Britain to take the chair of physics at the University of Manchester.