- Born on August 30, 1871
- His parents were Martha Thompson, an English schoolteacher, and James Rutherford, a Scottish wheelwright
- In 1894, he was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Science Scholarship
- This enabled him to go to Trinity College, Cambridge as a research student
· Gold foil experiment
a. Under the supervision of Rutherford, Geiger and Marsden performed the gold foil experiment
b. prove Thomson’s “plum pudding model”
c. To begin the experiment, they aimed a beam of alpha particles at a piece of gold foil
d. Polonium was put into a lead box that sent out alpha particles to a thin sheet of gold foil. The foil was then surrounded by a luminescent zinc sulfide screen that served as a backdrop for the alpha particles to appear on
· Atom has a small positive nucleus, remainder is empty space
· Predicted existence of neutrons
· He was born on August 30, 1871
· His mother, Martha Thompson, was an English schoolteacher
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· In 1894, he was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Science Scholarship, which enabled him to go to Trinity College, Cambridge, and research as a student
· Worked under JJ Thomson
· In 1919 he accepted an invitation to become Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge.
· first researches, in New Zealand, were concerned with the magnetic properties of iron exposed to high-frequency oscillations,
· His second paper was Magnetic Viscosity
· While he was at the Cavendish Laboratory, he invented a detector for electromagnetic waves
· He worked with Thomson on the behavior of the ions observed in gases that had been treated with X-rays
· studied the "emanation" of thorium and discovered a new noble gas, an isotope of radon, which was later to be known as thoron
· "disintegration theory" of radioactivity which regards radioactive phenomena as atomic - not molecular - processes.
· scattering of alpha rays and the nature of the inner structure of the atom which caused such scattering led to the postulation of his concept of the "nucleus", his greatest contribution to physics
