Rutherfords discoveries
Ernest Rutherford was born in New Zealand in 1871 as one of 12 children. It was Rutherford who first "split" an atom and who discovered the atomic "nucleus", a name that he invented. For this he is regarded as the greatest experimental physicist of his time. Rutherford was one of the first and most important researchers in nuclear physics. Soon after the discovery of radioactivity in 1986 by the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel, Rutherford discovered the three different types of radiation. By covering his Uranium with thin foils of aluminum, gradually increasing the number of foils. For the first three layers of foil the radiation escaping from the uranium decreased progressively, suggesting an ordinary law of absorption. More thickness of aluminum, however, had little further effect in reducing the radiation at first, but eventually the intensity of the radiation began to diminish again as even more foils were added. These experiments showed that there were at least two distinct types of radiation- one that is very readily absorbed, which he called the alpha - radiation, and the other more penetra
In 1919 Rutherford performed a pioneer experiment in nuclear physics when he bombarded nitrogen gas with alpha particles and obtained atoms of an oxygen isotope and protons. Rutherford was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1903 and served as president of that institution from 1925 to 1930. Of course the majority of the particles went straight through the gold and were only slightly scattered. Rutherford said that this was the most surprising result he had known. Rutherford said that in order to produce such a large deflection of the alpha particle, the atom must contain a massive charged center of very minute dimensions. When considering the mass and energy of an alpha particle this was an astonishing observation. Today, with the threat of nuclear weapons and the promise of nuclear power it must appear that the splitting of the atom was Rutherford's most significant achievement. Using this alpha radiation, Rutherford started to experiment putting it through other materials to get the effects. It also made great headway in the following decades of intensive research on the other nuclear transformation sand on the nature and properties of radiation. He found that a countable number of alpha particles actually bounced back from a thin sheet of gold foil. It was these discoveries in radiation that opened the door to the rest of Rutherford' discoveries. The Frenchman, Paul Villard, officially gave this third radiation. Rutherford was confident that we would get more information from scattering about the nature of the atom than any other method. From this statement we can see how immersed Rutherford actually was in his studies.
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