the first person to split the atom
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM,
FRS[1] (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a
New Zealand-born
British chemist and
physicist who became known as the father of
nuclear physics.
[2] In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive
half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. This work was done at
McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".
[3]
Rutherford performed his most famous work after he had moved to the U.K. in 1907 and was already a Nobel laureate. In 1911, he postulated that atoms have their positive charge concentrated in a very small
nucleus,
[4] and thereby pioneered the
Rutherford model of the
atom, through his discovery and interpretation of
Rutherford scattering in his
gold foil experiment. He is widely credited with first "splitting the atom" in 1917 in a
nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the
proton.
[5] This led to the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by two students working under his direction,
John Cockcroft and
Ernest Walton, in 1932.
After his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near
Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in
Westminster Abbey. The chemical element
rutherfordium (element 104) was named for him in 1997.
