50 Fun Facts About Ernest Rutherford

Rutherford, a physicist, won his 1908 Nobel Prize in which other subject?

Chemistry. The prize honoured his work on how radioactive elements change, and he joked that the quickest transformation he had ever seen was his own, from physicist to chemist.

Rutherford is widely known as the father of which field?

Nuclear physics. He showed that an atom's mass is packed into a tiny central nucleus, then ran the Cambridge laboratory where his students first split one with a machine.

How was Rutherford's first name mistakenly written on his birth certificate?

Earnest. He was officially registered with the stray 'a', but the misspelling never stuck, and to his family he was simply Ern.

Before raising twelve children, Rutherford's mother, Martha, had worked as what?

Schoolteacher. Martha Thompson had taught at the Spring Grove school, and all her own children learned their reading and writing from her.

Rutherford won the scholarship that took him to Cambridge only after the first-choice candidate did what?

Turned it down. The examiners ranked James Maclaurin of Auckland first, but he could not accept the scholarship's terms, so it passed to Rutherford, the only other candidate.

Which sport did Rutherford play at college in the 1880s?

Rugby. He played in the school team in 1889, the year he was head boy, though his real strength was mathematics, which later won him a university scholarship.

Rutherford's 1851 Research Fellowship took him in 1895 to which Cambridge laboratory?

The Cavendish. He came back in 1919 as its director and never left, presiding over 1932, when his team found a new particle and split the atom by machine within months.

In 1895 a new rule let Rutherford become Cambridge's first research student without what?

A degree from the university. Cambridge had just opened its laboratories to graduates of other institutions, and Rutherford, arriving with three New Zealand degrees, was first through the door.

Under which Cambridge physicist did Rutherford study from 1895?

J. J. Thomson. He soon moved Rutherford from radio waves to X-rays and gases, and later told McGill he had never had a student with more enthusiasm or ability for original research.

Rutherford's half-mile record for detecting radio waves was soon eclipsed by which wireless pioneer?

Guglielmo Marconi. Rutherford's professor pulled him off wireless to study X-rays instead, leaving Marconi to turn the idea into a business.

Rutherford's early Cambridge work on X-rays and gases fed into the 1897 discovery of what?

The electron. His professor went on to weigh the charged particles in those gases and found one far lighter than any atom, while Rutherford turned to the new rays from uranium.

In 1898 Rutherford took the Macdonald Chair of Physics at McGill University in which city?

Montreal. The research he did there over nine years earned his Nobel Prize, though the award came in 1908, the year after he had left Canada for England.

Which young chemist, a future Nobel laureate, joined Rutherford at McGill from 1900 to 1903?

Frederick Soddy. Rutherford, a physicist, needed a partner with a chemist's bench skills to separate the new radioactive substances; Soddy later gave science the word 'isotope'.

Which German chemist, later a discoverer of fission, worked under Rutherford at McGill in 1905-06?

Otto Hahn. He arrived having just found one new radioactive substance and found more in Rutherford's laboratory; his Berlin experiment split uranium in 1938, a year after Rutherford died.

Which term that Rutherford introduced for radioactivity is now also used of drugs in the body?

Half-life. He found that the radioactive substance given off by thorium lost half its strength in about a minute, however much of it he began with.

Rutherford's 'Law of Radioactive Change' made what then-radical claim about radioactivity?

Atoms disintegrate spontaneously. Until then the atom had been thought indestructible; now thorium and radium were caught slowly turning themselves into other elements.

What name did Rutherford give in 1903 to the penetrating radium radiation Paul Villard first noticed?

Gamma rays. Villard had spotted them in 1900 without giving them a name; Rutherford, who had already labelled alpha and beta rays, simply took the next Greek letter.

At a 1904 lecture, Rutherford's case for a far older Earth contradicted which elderly physicist in the audience?

Lord Kelvin. Rutherford recalled that Kelvin dozed until the awkward part, so he quickly said Kelvin's estimate had assumed no new kind of heat would be found, and radium was one; the old man beamed.

In 1907 Rutherford returned to Britain to take the Langworthy Professorship at which university?

Manchester. The post was free because Arthur Schuster, who had built up the physics laboratory there, gave up his own chair early on condition that Rutherford take it.

The particle detector Rutherford built with an assistant in 1908 evolved into which instrument?

Geiger counter. The 1908 original was built to count alpha particles one at a time in the laboratory; Hans Geiger made it a practical instrument with Walther Muller in 1928.

Rutherford and Thomas Royds proved that alpha particles are what?

Helium nuclei. They let alpha particles collect in a sealed, evacuated glass tube, sparked it, and watched the unmistakable spectrum of helium slowly appear.

Which student, working with Rutherford's assistant, first saw alpha particles bounce back off gold foil in 1909?

Ernest Marsden. He was an undergraduate handed the search as a training exercise that nobody expected to succeed; he went on to lead scientific research in New Zealand.

Rutherford likened the gold foil result to a 15-inch shell bouncing back off what?

A piece of tissue paper. The image comes from a lecture late in his life; the rebound had convinced him that an atom's mass sits in a tiny charged core, later named the nucleus.

Rutherford's gold foil results showed that an atom is mostly what?

Empty space. Almost every alpha particle flew straight through the foil as if nothing were there; only a rare one met something small and dense enough to turn it back.

During the First World War Rutherford worked for the Admiralty on detecting which threat?

Submarines. With William Bragg he concluded that the best hope was to listen for them underwater, and the hydrophone he developed became the only patent of his life.

Which young physicist in Rutherford's laboratory used X-rays in 1913 to give every element an atomic number?

Henry Moseley. His measurements put the elements in order by nuclear charge and showed where undiscovered ones were missing; he was killed at Gallipoli two years later, aged 27.

Rutherford's bombardment of nitrogen with alpha particles, reported in 1919, achieved the first artificial what?

Nuclear reaction. He showed that alpha particles could knock hydrogen nuclei out of nitrogen, the first time anyone had deliberately broken into an atomic nucleus; it is remembered as splitting the atom.

What did Rutherford name the hydrogen nucleus in 1920, proposing it as a building block of nuclei?

Proton. He drew it from the Greek for 'first', reportedly echoing William Prout's old idea that hydrogen builds every element; until then he had simply called it a hydrogen atom.

Patrick Blackett showed that Rutherford's bombardment of nitrogen with alpha particles produced which element, alongside the ejected particle?

Oxygen. Rutherford had seen only the particle that flew out; Blackett's cloud-chamber photographs caught the rare forked tracks where nitrogen swallowed the alpha and became a heavier element.

Which particle did Rutherford predict in 1920, twelve years before it was discovered in his own laboratory?

The neutron. Nuclei weighed about twice what their charge allowed, so he argued something neutral was hiding inside; James Chadwick, primed for years on what to look for, found it in 1932.

Which two researchers 'split the atom' with a particle accelerator at Cambridge in 1932?

Cockcroft and Walton. They fired hydrogen nuclei at lithium and broke it into pairs of alpha particles, at far lower voltages than Rutherford had long believed the job would need.

Which researcher under Rutherford at Cambridge won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating the ionosphere?

Edward Appleton. In 1924 he and a New Zealand student, Miles Barnett, showed that radio waves bounce off an electrified layer high in the atmosphere, work that later fed into radar.

In a 1933 speech, Rutherford dismissed hopes of power from atomic transformation as what?

Moonshine. He meant accelerators, which spent far more energy than the few atoms they split gave back; nuclear fission, the discovery that changed the sums, came only after his death.

Rutherford's 1933 dismissal of atomic power set which physicist thinking about chain reactions?

Leo Szilard. Annoyed by the remark when he read it in The Times, he hit on the self-sustaining chain reaction soon afterwards, by his own account while waiting to cross a London street.

Which protege of Rutherford was barred from returning to Cambridge after a visit home in 1934?

Pyotr Kapitza. He had spent thirteen years in Rutherford's laboratory; once it was clear he would not be let out, his Cambridge equipment was sold to Moscow and shipped after him.

Rutherford is said to have declared that all science is either physics or what?

Stamp collecting. The jibe is widely quoted as his, but nobody has found it in his own words; the earliest known attribution, by the physicist J. D. Bernal, dates from 1939, two years after his death.

Rutherford's picture of the atom overturned which earlier model?

The plum pudding model. It pictured negative charges dotted through a ball of positive charge like raisins in a pudding, which could nudge an alpha particle slightly but never hurl one back.

Rutherford's unexpected death in 1937 followed what seemingly minor complaint?

A small hernia. It became strangulated in October 1937, and he died after emergency surgery, aged 66 and still running his laboratory.

Where was Rutherford buried, near Newton and Darwin?

Westminster Abbey. His ashes were placed in the nave close to Newton's grave, and three years later his old Cambridge professor was laid to rest beside him.

Rutherfordium's name was contested for decades by scientists from which country?

Soviet Union. Its Dubna laboratory called element 104 kurchatovium after the head of Soviet nuclear research, Berkeley called it rutherfordium, and the 'Transfermium Wars' ran until 1997.

Rutherford replaced whose portrait on New Zealand's $100 note in 1992?

Queen Elizabeth II. The 1992 redesign kept her only on the $20 and gave Rutherford the top-value note, with his Nobel medal and a graph of radioactive decay beside him.

Which 1912 recruit of Rutherford's gave his model of the atom fixed orbits?

Niels Bohr. He fitted the new quantum idea to Rutherford's atom, so that the charges circling its centre could keep to set orbits instead of spiralling inward as older physics said they must.

Rutherford is credited, with Robert Owens, as a discoverer of which radioactive element?

Radon. In 1899 the two noticed thorium giving off a radioactive gas; Friedrich Dorn, who saw the same thing coming off radium a year later, was long given the credit instead.

Which form of hydrogen, later used in hydrogen bombs, did Rutherford's Cambridge team discover in 1934?

Tritium. Rutherford, Mark Oliphant and Paul Harteck made it by smashing heavy hydrogen into heavy hydrogen; unlike hydrogen's two lighter forms, it is radioactive.

When Rutherford was made a baron, he took his title from which place?

Nelson. He named his barony for the New Zealand province where he was born and schooled; the honour was announced days after the death of his only child, Eileen.

Rutherford has been called the greatest experimentalist since whom?

Michael Faraday. Both men cracked brand-new phenomena by tireless, simple, hands-on experiment; fittingly, the electrical engineers gave Rutherford their Faraday Medal in 1930.

Rutherford titled his last book, published in 1937, The Newer what?

Alchemy. The title recalls the old dream of turning one element into another, which physics had made real in work that began with his own bombardment of nitrogen.

Rutherford's atom is often likened to a miniature what?

Solar system. The picture had a flaw: by the physics of the day, an orbiting charge should radiate away its energy and spiral into the centre almost at once.

As a research student and later a fellow, Rutherford belonged to which Cambridge college?

Trinity. His old professor became the college's Master and resigned his chair, which brought Rutherford back to Cambridge in 1919 as his successor and a fellow of the college.

Rutherford was first president of a council set up to help scholars dismissed by which regime?

Nazi Germany. The Academic Assistance Council, founded in 1933, supported academics forced out under Hitler while they found new posts, and sixteen of them went on to win Nobel Prizes.