By: Shelby, Udit, Joey

Background Information  I was born on August 30, 1871, in Nelson, New Zealand. I am the fourth child and second son in a family of seven boys and five girls.  My mother is a school teacher and my father is a Scottish wheelwright.  I spent much of my time working on X rays.  I moved to Montreal and become a Professor of Physics. In 1908 I was awarded the Nobel Prize for tracking down various disintegration products and emanations and relating them to their family trees.

Education  I was educated at Canterbury College in Christchurch, I received my bachelor's degree in The following year I took my master's degree with honors in mathematics and physics.

What did Rutherford do?  I went on to name the alpha and beta particles and the gamma ray.  I also invented the name proton for the nucleus of an atom.  I discovered that protons are concentrated at the centre of an atom.

Three Achievements  I radically altered our understanding of nature on three separate occasions. Through brilliantly conceived experiments, and with special insight, I explained the perplexing problem of radioactivity as the spontaneous disintegration of atoms he determined the structure of the atom and he was the world's first successful alchemist Or in other words I was the first to split the atom.

More Discoveries  His 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 ionization chamber and observed the change in ionization.

Rutherford's Model  I cooked up a new model of the atom in which all of the positive charge is crammed inside a tiny, massive nucleus about ten thousand times smaller than the atom as a whole. That's equivalent in scale to a marble in the middle of a football stadium. The much lighter electrons, he assumed, lay well outside the nucleus. To the shock and amazement of everyone, the atoms of which planets, people, pianos, and everything else are made consisted almost entirely of empty space.

Advances our Understanding My nuclear model of the atom was a huge step forward in understanding nature at the ultrasmall scale. But even as it closed the casebook on the alpha particle experiment, it threw open another one. Since the nucleus and its retinue of electrons are oppositely charged, and therefore attract one another, there didn't seem anything to stop the electrons from being pulled immediately into the nucleus. Throughout the universe, atomic matter ought to implode in the wink of an eye.

Rutherford's Flaw  The fatal flaw in Rutherford's model is that it contains charges that are accelerating. The charges are on the electrons and the acceleration is due to the electrons always changing direction as they move around their orbits. Since Maxwell's time, scientists had known that accelerating charges radiate energy. What was to stop the orbiting electrons in Rutherford's atom quickly (in fact, in about one hundred-millionth of a second) losing all their energy and spiraling into the nucleus?

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