Physicist — Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) was a New Zealand physicist, regarded as the father of nuclear physics. Born in New Zealand, he worked in Canada (McGill) and in England (Manchester and Cambridge). He distinguished and named alpha and beta radiation and clarified the nature of radioactive decay as the transmutation of elements. In 1909, with the alpha-particle scattering experiment carried out by his collaborators Geiger and Marsden, he discovered that the atom has a tiny, dense, positively charged nucleus, proposing the planetary model of the atom. In 1919 he achieved the first artificial transmutation of an element. He received the Nobel Prize, curiously in chemistry, in 1908.
Curiosity
He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and joked that the fastest transformation he had ever witnessed was his own, from physicist to chemist.
Theories and contributions
- Rutherford atomic model — The atom has a small, dense, positive nucleus around which the electrons orbit; deduced from alpha-particle scattering.
- Alpha and beta radiation — Classification of the radiation emitted by radioactive substances according to penetrating power and charge.
- Law of radioactive decay — The number of nuclei decays exponentially with time: .
- Nuclear transmutation — First artificial transformation of one element into another, by bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles (1919).
Present in chapters
Linked atoms
2 linked atoms.