The man who looked inside the atom
"We're celebrating something really important. We're celebrating nothing less than the birth of modern physics."
As eulogies go, Dr Andrew Taylor's opening remarks at a conference to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Ernest Rutherford's description of the atom takes some beating.
More's the pity then that this rousing soliloquy, and the speeches that followed, were heard only by a relatively small audience drawn exclusively from within the physics community. A handful of scientists preaching to the converted.
Rutherford's status within that community has never been in doubt, but the physicist and author Graham Farmelo believes the father of nuclear physics deserves much wider acclaim.
"Rutherford's discovery of the structure of the atom is right up there in 20th century science among the greatest discoveries. Right next to Crick and Watson's description of DNA".
To understand why Rutherford inspires such flights of rhetoric we need to scroll back to the turn of the last century, to a period in which JJ Thomson was discovering the electron, and Henri Becquerel was investigating the properties of radioactivity. A period in which the 'plum pudding' model of the atom held sway.
Working with Hans Geiger and and Ernest Marsden in Manchester, Rutherford (who had already received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on the transmutation of atoms) devised an experiment that involved bombarding a thin sheet of gold foil with Alpha particles.
Most of the particles passed straight through, but every now and then one was deflected onto a fluorescing plate. It was an astonishing observation, and one that took Rutherford the best part of two years to explain.
As he later recalled, "it was as if a 15-inch naval shell had been fired at a piece of tissue paper and bounced back".
What Rutherford realised was that the mass of an atom could not be evenly spread out - like plums in a pudding - but must be focused at its core. Only a solid, dense nucleus would have the mass to divert an energetic Alpha particle set on a collision course. The resulting paper, The Scattering of Alpha and Beta Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom , was published in the Philosophical Magazine a hundred years ago this month.
It was Rutherford's intuitive leap to a new 'planetary' model of the atom - where individual electrons orbit a solid central nucleus - that Graham Farmelo argues was one of the most profound insights of 20th century science.
Ernest Rutherford Experiment - News
So claimed Ernest Rutherford, the British physicist who discovered the atomic nucleus in 1910, touting the explanatory power of physics over the busywork of classifying elements or planets or animals. One hundred years later, the endless variety of
Working with Hans Geiger and and Ernest Mardsen in Manchester, Rutherford (who had already received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on the transmutation of atoms) devised an experiment that involved bombarding a thin sheet of gold foil with
At the same time, Ernest Rutherford was sweeping away established atomic theory with his famous 'gold foil' experiment, showing that atoms were mainly empty space with a tiny, dense nucleus. 100 years on, 2011 is an appropriate year to celebrate the
Weinberg reviewed the history of particle physics, starting with Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the atomic nucleus a century ago, and quickly progressed to the need for a new, large linear accelerator, a machine that shoots subatomic particles
Um die Atomstruktur näher zu erkunden, führte der deutsche Physiker Hans Geiger in Manchester unter der Leitung des Neuseeländers Ernest Rutherford im Mai 1911 ein für diese Zeit typisches Experiment durch. Er streute Strahlen an Materie: Geiger und
Physical Science 7.4g – Ernest Rutherford | Top College Scholarships
@Musakhann Yes, that’s correct. It was Geiger and Marsden, but I think it was Rutherford’s idea, and he was in charge of it. Geiger and Marsden did the experiment under Rutherford’s direction, and Rutherford interpreted the results and wrote the paper on it, so the experiment is named after Rutherford, probably for good reason.
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