Inspirational Quotes by Ernest Rutherford (New Zealand-born Physicist)

Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937,) fully Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, of Cambridge, was a New Zealand-born British physicist. Considered one of the greatest of all experimental physicists, this winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry came to be known as the father of nuclear physics.

Born the son of Scottish immigrant farmers in Spring Grove, now Brightwater, on the South Island of New Zealand, Rutherford attended Nelson College and Canterbury College, Christchurch. He won a scholarship to Cavendish Laboratory and Trinity College, Cambridge. Working under physicist J J Thomson, Rutherford discovered the three types of uranium radiations.

Over an illustrious career, Rutherford became the central figure in the study of radioactivity. At McGill University in Montreal, Canada, he worked with chemist Frederick Soddy. Their Nobel-winning research proposed that radioactivity results from the disintegration of atoms. In 1907, Rutherford joined Manchester University. He established that alpha particles were doubly ionized helium ions, which could be counted with a device he jointly invented with the German physicist Hans Geiger. Rutherford’s assistant, Niels Bohr, applied this concept to the quantum theory—this led to the idea of the ‘Rutherford-Bohr atom’ and the birth of nuclear physics.

After World War I, Rutherford discovered that the nuclei of elements such as nitrogen could be ‘disintegrated’ by the impact of energetic alpha particles creating fast protons were emitted. This was the first artificially induced nuclear reaction. In 1919, Rutherford became a professor of experimental physics and director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, succeeding J J Thomson. Many of Rutherford’s students at the Cavendish Laboratory went on to become pioneering scientists. For instance, he supervised the Nobel Prize-winning research of Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft on particle accelerators.

Rutherford was buried in London’s Westminster Abbey. The synthetic chemical element Rutherfordium was named after him in 1997.

Rutherford’s works include Radioactivity (1904,) Radioactive Transformations (1906,) Radioactive Substances (1930,) and The Newer Alchemy (1937.) Biographies include physicist Edward Andrade’s Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom (1964.) BBC’s David Wilson wrote the famous Rutherford, Simple Genius (1983.)

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