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Ernest Rutherford
Life Details
Born: 30th August 1871. Died: 19th October 1937.
Introduction
Ernest, Baron Rutherford of Nelson was a New Zealand-born British physicist famed for his work on radioactivity and the structure of the atom. His work led to the exploration of nucler physics.
Early Life
Ernest was the fourth child and second son of father James Rutherford and mother Martha Thompson. Both from the United Kingdom, they moved to New Zealand as a farmer and schoolteacher, respectively.
Rutherford attended free state schools until he won a scholarship to attend Nelson Collegiate School. He excelled in nearly every subject, but particularly in mathematics and science.
Between the years 1889 and 1897, he studied various mathematics and sciences, and gained Masters and Bachelors of each subject. It was until 1898 that he then left New Zealand for Canada to take up a post at McGill University, Montreal.
Rutherford returned to England in 1907 to become Professor of Physics in the University of Manchester. He also took on other roles, such as Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge, Chairman of the Advisory Council, H.M. Government, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Professor of Natural Philosophy, Royal Institution London, and Director of the Royal Society Mond Laboratory, Cambridge.
Work Life
In 1917, Rutherford returned to physics, and a long series of experiments where he discovered the nuclei of certain light elements could be disintegrated by the impact of alpha particles from radioactive sources. It would later be presented that this was the first nuclear reaction, and so began the nuclear race for energy and weapons.
Rutherford named alpha particles and beta particles, and figured that alpha particles were the same as an ordinary helium atom, with two protons and two neutrons, and beta particles are the same as an electron, or it's positive version, a positron.
Half-life was discovered when testing the reaction time of radioelements when treated with chemicals, and it was figured that each element ranged from seconds of reaction to billions of years. If you take modern day physics and look at Chernobyl, this is a prime example of the half-life of isotopes of iodine and caesium.
Later Life & Death
Ernest Rutherford had a long career as a physicist, and was awarded a life peerage in 1931, just six years before he died in 1937. In 1997, a "rutherford", a unit of radioactivity, was named in his honour.
