2. What Is A Nuclear
Physicist ?
Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies the
building blocks and interactions of atomic nuclei. The most
commonly known applications of nuclear physics are nuclear
power generation and nuclear weapons technology, but the
research has provided application in many fields, including
those in nuclear medicine and magnetic resonance imaging,
ion implantation in materials engineering, and radiocarbon
dating in geology and archaeology.
The field of particle physics evolved out of nuclear physics
and is typically taught in close association with nuclear
physics.
3. Ernest Rutherford Childhood
Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford. Who was a successful farmer. His
Mother Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England. James had
emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland, "to raise a little flax and a lot of children".
Ernest was born at Spring Grove (now Brightwater), near Nelson, New Zealand on the 30th
of August 1871. His first name was mistakenly spelled Earnest when his birth was registered.
He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at
Canterbury College, University of New Zealand where he was president of the debating
society, among other things. After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of
research at the forefront of electrical technology, in 1895 Rutherford travelled to England for
postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge (1895–1898), and
he briefly held the world record for the distance over which electromagnetic waves could be
detected.
In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to succeed Hugh Longbourne Callendar in the chair of
Macdonald Professor of physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he did the
work that gained him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. In 1900 he gained a DSc from
the University of New Zealand. Also in 1900 he married Mary Georgina Newton (1876–1945);
they had one daughter, Eileen Mary (1901–1930), who married Ralph Fowler. In 1907
Rutherford moved to Britain to take the chair of physics at the University of Manchester.
4. Ernest Rutherford Carer
Ernest Rutherford was the first person to split the
atom. He first "split the atom" in 1917 in a nuclear
reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in
which he also discovered (and named) the proton.
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. Spitting the
atom led to the first nuclear boom.
5. Ernest Rutherford The
Nuclear Physicist
Rutherford's research, and work done under him as laboratory
director, established the nuclear structure of the atom and the
essential nature of radioactive decay. Rutherford's team also
demonstrated artificially induced nuclear transmutation. He is
known as the father of nuclear physics. Rutherford died too
early to see Leó Szilárd's idea of controlled nuclear chain
reactions come into being. However, a speech of Rutherford's
about artificially induced transmutation printed in the
September 12, 1933 London paper The Times is reported by
Szilárd to have been his inspiration for thinking of the
possibility of a controlled nuclear chain reaction, in London, on
the same day.
6. Ernest Rutherford
Scientific Research
During the investigation of radioactivity he coined the terms alpha
ray and beta ray in 1899 to describe the two distinct types of radiation
emitted by thorium and uranium. These rays were differentiated on
the basis of penetrating power. From 1900 to 1903 he was joined at
McGill by the young Frederick Soddy (Nobel Prize in Chemistry,
1921) and they collaborated on research into the transmutation of
elements. Rutherford had demonstrated that radioactivity was the
spontaneous disintegration of atoms. He noticed that a sample of
radioactive material invariably took the same amount of time for half
the sample to decay—its "half-life"—and created a practical
application using this constant rate of decay as a clock, which could
then be used to help determine the age of the Earth, which turned
out to be much older than most of the scientists at the time believed.
