Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British physicist whose 35-year scientific career produced foundational discoveries in atomic physics — making him widely cited as the "father of nuclear physics." He was born Ernest Rutherford on August 30, 1871, in Brightwater, Nelson, New Zealand, into a Scottish-immigrant farming family. He attended Nelson College and the University of New Zealand at Christchurch (where he earned an 1893 Bachelor's degree in mathematics and physical science).

His 1895 Cambridge University study transfer — to the Cavendish Laboratory under J.J. Thomson — launched his British academic career. The 1895–1898 Cambridge period produced his study of radioactive emissions and his identification of alpha and beta radiation as two distinct types of radioactive emissions. He moved to McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1898, where he served as Macdonald Professor of Physics for the next nine years.

His 1903 collaboration with Frederick Soddy at McGill produced the disintegration theory of radioactivity — establishing that radioactive elements transform into different elements through radioactive decay. The 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for his radioactivity work) — awarded while he was still considered a physicist by his colleagues — established his position as one of the foundational figures of 20th-century physics.

His 1909 gold-foil experiment (conducted with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden at the University of Manchester, where Rutherford had moved in 1907) produced the 1911 Rutherford model of the atom — establishing that atoms have small dense positively-charged nuclei surrounded by mostly-empty space containing orbital electrons. The 1919 successful artificial transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen — through alpha-particle bombardment — was the first deliberately-induced nuclear-transmutation experiment in history. He was knighted in 1914 (Sir Ernest Rutherford) and raised to the peerage in 1931 (Baron Rutherford of Nelson). He died on October 19, 1937, at age 66, in Cambridge, England.

His name Ernest is from the Old Germanic Ernust meaning "earnest" or "serious." Ernest has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for over a century.