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ERNEST RUTHERFORD
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Ernest Rutherford was
born on the 30th of August 1871 in Brightwater near Nelon city in
New Zeland. He studied on the University of New Zeland, and then he
got a scholarship in Cambridge. He worked there under the
management of Sir Joseph John
Thomson, in the Cavendish Laboratory. In Cambridge Rutheford
conferred a doctor's degree. He was appointed to a professorship on
the University of Montreal. He started to search on radioactive discovering alpha particle and beta particle. He discovered in 1899
that particles of alpha were a flux of helium atoms but devoided of
electrons. And beta particles are electrons. In 1903 he published
with Frederic Soddy a work
(Frederick Soddy was a
British scientist searching on radioactive; Nobel price 1921). In the
work there was a formula describing radioactivity dependence on time and the
proof that quantity of radioactive disintegration in the sample
is proportional to the quantity of atoms of radioactive substance.
Rutheford discovered that proportionality constant for different
elements was rendered by some other constant which he called
radioactivity constant (decay
constant). It determined radioactivity disintegration rate. A
year later he ascertained that decay constant inverse multiplied by
some number defined a half-life period-time required to reduce
element's radioactivity in half.
He proved that searching polonium radium for which the half-life
period was much shorter than for uranium.
In 1907 he came back to
England. He became a professor in Manchester. He set to study the
interaction of alpha rays with matter. With Hans Geiger constructed
an instrument recording alpha particles- spinthariscope. (Hans Geiger - the constructor of
particle counter; the inventor of the empirical law of radioactive
disintegration). Thanks to the spinthariscope Rutheford's
assistants (Geiger and
Marsden) managed to
observe the occurrence explained later in 1911 by Rutheford by his
new, planetary model of atom.
In 1914 Rutheford proved
the wave structure of gamma radiation. In 1919 he moved to
Cambridge where he became a director of Cavendish Laboratory. In
the same year he managed to conduct the first in the history
artificial nuclear
transformation. Shooting nitrogen atoms by alpha rays he
received a new kind of radiation of the hydrogenium atom mass and
positive charge. That was a beam of protons:
During the First World War Rutheford found the method of detecting German submarines by radio monitoring.
In 1908 Rutheford received a Noble price. In 1914 he was ennobled; then he became a baron. He died on the 19th of October 1937.
