#RUTHERFORD ATOM SERIES#

Ernest Rutherford in his lab at McGill University (1905). Without compass or map, Rutherford managed to form a clear picture of what the atom looks like thanks to radioactivity. Rutherford rode that wave of dazzling discoveries and became the leader of a new generation of explorers in the British Empire who, rather than lose themselves in the vastness of a continent, preferred to delve into the smallest thing known: the atom. Thompson, plucked a smaller, negatively charged particle, the electron, from the interior of the atom. In that era, revolutionary discoveries were being made every year: in 1896 it was radioactivity, and in 1897 Rutherford’s boss, J.J. Its publication broke the scientific dogma that the atom was indivisible (which is what atom means in Greek).Įrnest Rutherford (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was born the same year that Henry Morton Stanley finally found another famous explorer in the middle of Africa and uttered one of the most iconic phrases in British history: “Doctor Livingston, I presume.” Rutherford, born on a farm in the remote colony of New Zealand, linked one scholarship with another and in that way reached a legendary laboratory at Cambridge University in England in 1895, the year of the discovery of X-rays. The idea was so groundbreaking that Rutherford and Soddy tried to avoid prejudices and spoke of transformation instead of transmutation when they published “The cause and nature of radioactivity” in 1902, which summarized their experiments resulting in the theory of atomic disintegration. Transmutation, which had been sought for so many centuries by alchemists, happened spontaneously and naturally. And they had eventually succeeded in demonstrating that the atoms in radioactive materials disintegrate, so that the atoms of a radioactive element are transformed into another element. They had long sought to understand the phenomenon of radioactivity, discovered by Becquerel and described by Marie and Pierre Curie.

#RUTHERFORD ATOM SERIES#

This is how New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and his colleague Englishman Frederick Soddy reacted to the surprising result of a series of careful experiments conducted in 1901 at McGill University in Montreal (Canada). They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.” “For Mike’s sake, Soddy, don’t call it transmutation.

Rutherford atom