ERNEST RUTHERFORD..

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ERNEST RUTHERFORD

By Michelle Cruz, Nina delos Reyes, Nicolle Groves, Lalique Lorenzo, and Marga Villarosa of II-9

BIOGRAPHY

Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England. James had emigrated 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. 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 the chair 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.

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Ernest Rutherford is one of the most illustrious scientists of all time.
He is to the atom what Darwin is to evolution, Newton to mechanics, Faraday to electricity and Einstein to relativity. His pathway from rural child to immortality is a fascinating one.
Rutherford's works ensure his immortality. As the The New York Times stated, in a eulogy accompanying the announcement of his unexpected and unnecessary death in 1937.
" It is given to but few men to achieve immortality, still less to achieve Olympian rank, during their own lifetime. Lord Rutherford achieved both. In a generation that witnessed one of the greatest revolutions in the entire history of science he was universally acknowledged as the leading explorer of the vast infinitely complex universe within the atom, a universe that he was first to penetrate."
Not for him the fame based on one discovery. He radically altered our understanding of nature on three separate occasions. Through brilliantly conceived experiments, and with special insight, he explained the perplexing problem
of radioactivity as the spontaneous disintegration of atoms (they were not necessarily stable entities as had been assumed since the time of the ancient Greeks), he determined the structure of the atom and he was the world's first successful alchemist  (he converted nitrogen into oxygen). Or put another way, he was first to split the atom.
Any of his secondary discoveries, such as dating the age of the Earth, would have given fame to a lesser scientist. For example, the first method invented to detect individual nuclear particles by electrical means, the Rutherford-Geiger detector, evolved into the Geiger-Muller tube. The modern smoke detector, responsible for saving so many lives in house fires, can be traced back to 1899 when, at McGill University in Canada, Rutherford blew tobacco smoke into his ionisation chamber and observed the change in ionisation.


THE RUTHERFORD MODEL

-he suggested that J.J. Thompson's "Plum pudding model" was incorrect
-in his model electrons circled around the nucleus like planets going around it's orbit
-his models is made up of a central charge surrounded by a cloud of orbiting electrons
-it served to concentrate a great deal of the atom's charge and mass to a very small core
-he suggested that an atom might be "proportional" to its atomic mass
-The mass of heavy atoms such as gold is mostly concentrated in the central charge region
-the atom is not ultimately a single particle, but is made up of smaller subatomic particles

See videos posted below. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSEOOMs5VNU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsq9OiM76OY&feature=related

HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL EVENTS

1. 1910 - The first use of aircraft as an offensive weapon occurred in the Turkish-Italian War
2. 1911 - Rutherford formulates theory of the atomic structure
3. 1912 - Titanic sinks and Wars of Balkan states with Turkey & against each other (Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Greece)
4. 1913 - Niels Bohr formulates his own theory of the atomic structure and Woodrow Wilson 28^th President of US
5. 1914 - World War I
6. 1915 - Einstein postulates his General Theory of Relativity
7. 1917 - German-Russian armistice signed and Russian Revolution and Civil War Red army defeats anti-Bolshevik White armies
8. 1918 - Czar Nicholas II executed in Siberia and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland independent
9. 1919 - Peace conference at Versailles opens
10. 1920 - League of Nations
11. 1924 - Hitler writes "Mien Kampf"
12. 1929 - 1939 The Great Depression
13. 1933 - Roosevelt's "New Deal"
14. 1933 - Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany
15. 1937 - Picasso - "Guernica"

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_model

http://www.rutherford.org.nz/biography.htm

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