PERSON

Ernest Rutherford

The experimental physicist who learned the hidden structure of the atom by bombarding it and reading the rebounds—and who, having split the atom himself, publicly declared the practical release of atomic energy to be “moonshine,” a forecast refuted within twenty-four hours by a physicist irritated by his confidence.

Ernest Rutherford belongs to the rarest class of scientists: those who did not refine a picture of the world but replaced it, and who did so not by thinking harder but by aiming better. Born in 1871 on a flax farm in New Zealand, he carried the practical resourcefulness of that upbringing into every laboratory he ran. His signature was the experiment that forces nature to confess a hidden structure. The most famous of these—the gold-foil scattering experiment he directed at Manchester between 1909 and 1911—established the modern picture of the atom: mostly empty, with nearly all its mass concentrated in a nucleus thousands of times smaller than the atom itself. He did not see the nucleus; he inferred it from the pattern of how a beam of alpha particles scattered when fired at a thin sheet of gold. In 1919 he became the first person to transmute

Keep reading with YOU ON AI