50 Fun Facts About Ernest Rutherford

Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize was awarded in which subject?

The citation covered 'the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances'.

Rutherford is widely known as the father of which field?

His own work and that done under him established the nuclear structure of the atom and the nature of radioactive decay.

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

His family simply called him Ern.

Rutherford was the fourth of how many children?

His father James was a farmer and mechanic from Perth, Scotland; his mother a schoolteacher from Essex.

The Rutherfords moved to Havelock in 1883 to be near what business run by his father?

Ernest was eleven and attended Havelock School.

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

He was head boy in 1889 and turned down a government cadetship to finish his studies.

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

He would return as its director in 1919 and hold the post until his death.

Rutherford was among the first 'aliens' allowed to research at the university. What did 'alien' mean?

He was also, he felt, honoured to study under the discoverer of the electron.

Under which Cambridge physicist did Rutherford study from 1895?

Thomson later recommended him for the McGill chair and was succeeded by him at the Cavendish.

Rutherford briefly held the radio-wave detection record at half a mile. Who beat him by 1896?

Marconi's waves had carried a message nearly ten miles.

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

Hearing of Becquerel's uranium rays soon turned him toward radioactivity.

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

The Nobel-winning work on radioactive disintegration was done there.

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

Together they showed that radioactivity is the spontaneous disintegration of atoms.

What name did Rutherford and his McGill collaborator give the radioactive gas emitted by thorium?

It later proved to be radon-220, an isotope of radon.

Which term did Rutherford coin for the time it takes a radioactive sample to decay to 50 per cent?

His thoron samples always took eleven and a half minutes to halve, whatever their size.

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

Until then atoms had been assumed to be the indestructible basis of all matter.

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

He had already named alpha and beta rays in 1899; all three terms are still standard.

Rutherford's 1904 claim that radioactivity could power the Sun for aeons contradicted which physicist in the audience?

Kelvin had argued for a much younger Earth on the grounds that no known energy source could last longer.

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

The nucleus, the proton and the first induced nuclear reaction all came out of his years there.

With Hans Geiger, Rutherford developed zinc sulphide what, for counting alpha particles?

Dividing total charge by the count told him each alpha carried a charge of two.

Rutherford and Thomas Royds proved in 1907 that alpha particles are what?

Alphas trapped in an evacuated tube eventually showed the clear spectrum of helium.

The 1909 gold foil experiment was performed under Rutherford's direction by Hans Geiger and whom?

Rutherford asked them to look for alphas bouncing back at very high angles, which no theory predicted.

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

It led him to propose a tiny, charged nucleus holding most of the atom's mass.

By counting scintillations, Rutherford determined the charge on an alpha particle to be what?

He divided the total charge collected on the screen by the number of flashes.

During the First World War Rutherford worked on submarine detection using which effect?

The work fed into modern ultrasound, though the claim that he invented sonar is a misconception.

With whom did Rutherford develop the atomic numbering system in 1913?

Their cathode-ray experiments showed each element responded in its own distinct way.

Rutherford's 1917 alpha-particle bombardment of nitrogen achieved the first artificial what?

The nitrogen ejected a particle he first called a 'hydrogen atom'.

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

He had spent three years calling it the 'hydrogen atom' or 'positive electron'.

Patrick Blackett showed that Rutherford's nitrogen-plus-alpha reaction produced which element, alongside the ejected particle?

The nucleus, Rutherford noted, could grow in mass even as it expelled a proton.

Which particle did Rutherford christen in his 1920 Bakerian Lecture, long before Chadwick found it?

He reasoned something neutral must stop the protons' repulsion from blowing nuclei apart.

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

They split lithium into alpha particles by bombarding it with protons.

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

Chadwick, Cockcroft and Walton were the other Nobel winners of his tenure.

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

He judged accelerator-driven splitting hopelessly inefficient, which for light elements remains true today.

Rutherford's 1933 lithium speech set which physicist thinking about chain reactions?

Rutherford died in 1937, too early to see the idea realised.

Rutherford's only daughter, Eileen, married which physicist?

She died in 1930 giving birth to her fourth child.

Which two hobbies did Rutherford enjoy?

He married Mary Newton in Christchurch in 1900, having been engaged before he left New Zealand.

Rutherford lived on Wilmslow Road in which suburb, in a house now called Rutherford Lodge?

It got a blue plaque in 2012, and there is a memorial in the pavement outside the library.

Rutherford's death in 1937 followed his neglect of what minor complaint?

It became strangulated; an emergency operation in London came too late and he died four days later, aged 66.

Where was Rutherford buried, near Newton and Darwin?

He was cremated at Golders Green first.

Rutherfordium, named for him in 1997, has which atomic number?

He is one of the few scientists honoured with an element.

Rutherford's portrait has appeared since 1999 on the New Zealand banknote of what denomination?

The same year a poll named him the tenth greatest physicist of all time.

In a 1999 ranking, Rutherford was named the how-many-eth greatest physicist of all time?

He is often called the greatest experimentalist since Faraday.

Which radioactive element is among Rutherford's discoveries?

He also discovered the concept of half-life and named alpha and beta radiation.

With Geiger and which mathematician did Rutherford first analyse radioactive emission as a Poisson distribution in 1910?

It was the first analysis of the distribution in time of radioactive decays.

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

It was the town where he had gone to college on his second attempt at a scholarship.

Rutherford has been called the greatest experimentalist since whom?

James Jeans said that to match his output in quantity and quality 'we must go back to Newton'.

Before leaving New Zealand, Rutherford invented a new form of what device?

It won him the fellowship that took him to Cambridge in 1895.

In which New Zealand settlement was Rutherford born in 1871?

His father James was a farmer and mechanic from Perth, Scotland, and his mother Martha a schoolteacher from Hornchurch, England; the family called him Ern.

Whom did Rutherford marry in 1900 at St Paul's Anglican Church in Papanui, Christchurch?

They had been engaged before he left New Zealand; their only child, Eileen, died in 1930 giving birth to her fourth child.

Which astrophysicist spoke in Rutherford's place at the 1938 Indian Science Congress and compared him to Newton?

Rutherford had been due to preside over the congress before his sudden death from a strangulated hernia in October 1937.