Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871, in Nelson, New Zealand. He was the fourth child of James Rutherford and Martha Thompson. Earnest received his education from government schools during the early years of his life, and he enrolled into Nelson Collegiate School at 16. In 1889 he was awarded a University scholarship and he proceeded to the University of New Zealand, Wellington, where he entered Canterbury College. He graduated with a M.A. in 1893 with a double first in Mathematics and Physical Science and he continued there for a short time, receiving the B.Sc. degree the following year. That same year, 1894, he was awarded a science scholarship, enabling him to go to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory under J.J. Thomson, a professor at Cambridge. He then later became a professor at Cambridge himself.

Throughout his life, Earnest Rutherford made several significant discoveries and accomplishments that changed the world of science today. In 1901 he and chemist Frederick Soddy discovered that atoms change into different atoms upon emission of radiation and published papers on their discoveries. In 1904, Rutherford published his first book, Radioactivity. Within those five years, Rutherford, with the help of Soddy, had solved many problems of radioactivity and had realized that radioactive atoms change spontaneously to other atoms. This might have been his most important accomplishment because in 1908, Rutherford received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on radioactivity. After that, he began investigating the properties of alpha particles with the help of some of his 15 research students. A series of experiments led him to believe that alpha particles were, in fact, helium atoms, and to prove this in 1909 he performed a simple and clever experiment where he put alpha particles into a cathode ray tube. A substance which emitted alpha particles was placed outside a closed evacuated tube having