Mitchell Spencer Stephanie <3 Ernest Rutherford Mitchell Spencer Stephanie <3

Biography Ernest Rutherford was born in Nelson, New Zealand in 1871. He lived until 1937. He went to college at the University of New Zealand and Cambridge. He was a professor of physics at McGill University in Montréal, Quebec, from 1898 to 1907 and also at the University of Manchester in England during the following 12 years. He won the Nobel peace prize in 1908 for his empty space theory. He is also featured on the 100 dollar bill in New Zealand. According to his theory if an atom were the size of a football field, the nucleus would be the size of a marble. Although it was an improvement of Thompson’s theory, it was still incomplete.

Rutherford published his atomic theory describing the atom as having a central positive nucleus surrounded by negative orbiting electrons. This model suggested that most of the mass of the atom was contained in the small nucleus, and that the rest of the atom was mostly empty space. Rutherford came to this conclusion following the results of his famous gold foil experiment. This experiment involved the firing of radioactive particles through minutely thin metal foils and detecting them using screens coated with zinc sulfide. Rutherford found that although the vast majority of particles passed straight through the foil approximately 1 in 8000 were deflected leading him to his theory that most of the atom was made up of 'empty space'.