50 free Ernest Rutherford trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Ernest Rutherford trivia quiz covers the New Zealander they call the father of nuclear physics. The easy questions handle the gold foil experiment, the nucleus, alpha, beta and gamma, the proton, half-life and the Nobel Prize that, to his amusement, was for chemistry. From there it moves through the life: the misspelt birth certificate, the flax mill, the rugby, the scholarship to Cambridge as an 'alien', the radio record Marconi took away from him, and the Montreal years with Frederick Soddy. The harder end covers thoron, the tissue-paper quote, the piezoelectric submarine work, the atomic numbering system with Moseley, the nitrogen-into-oxygen reaction, the 1933 'moonshine' speech that set Szilard thinking, the neglected hernia, the peerage title, the element with his name and the banknote he still appears on. Every answer was checked against Rutherford's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our physics and famous physicists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize was awarded in which subject?
Chemistry
The citation covered 'the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances'.
Q 02Rutherford is widely known as the father of which field?
Nuclear physics
His own work and that done under him established the nuclear structure of the atom and the nature of radioactive decay.
Q 03How was Rutherford's first name mistakenly written on his birth certificate?
Earnest
His family simply called him Ern.
Q 04Rutherford was the fourth of how many children?
Twelve
His father James was a farmer and mechanic from Perth, Scotland; his mother a schoolteacher from Essex.
Q 05The Rutherfords moved to Havelock in 1883 to be near what business run by his father?
A flax mill
Ernest was eleven and attended Havelock School.
Q 06Which sport did Rutherford play at college in the 1880s?
Rugby
He was head boy in 1889 and turned down a government cadetship to finish his studies.
Q 07Rutherford's 1851 Research Fellowship took him in 1895 to which Cambridge laboratory?
The Cavendish
He would return as its director in 1919 and hold the post until his death.
Q 08Rutherford was among the first 'aliens' allowed to research at the university. What did 'alien' mean?
Someone lacking a Cambridge degree
He was also, he felt, honoured to study under the discoverer of the electron.
Q 09Under which Cambridge physicist did Rutherford study from 1895?
J. J. Thomson
Thomson later recommended him for the McGill chair and was succeeded by him at the Cavendish.
Q 10Rutherford briefly held the radio-wave detection record at half a mile. Who beat him by 1896?
Guglielmo Marconi
Marconi's waves had carried a message nearly ten miles.
Q 11Rutherford's early Cambridge work on X-rays and gases fed into the 1897 discovery of what?
The electron
Hearing of Becquerel's uranium rays soon turned him toward radioactivity.
Q 12In 1898 Rutherford took the Macdonald Chair of Physics at McGill University in which city?
Montreal
The Nobel-winning work on radioactive disintegration was done there.
Q 13Which young chemist, a future Nobel laureate, joined Rutherford at McGill from 1900 to 1903?
Frederick Soddy
Together they showed that radioactivity is the spontaneous disintegration of atoms.
Q 21Rutherford and Thomas Royds proved in 1907 that alpha particles are what?
Helium nuclei
Alphas trapped in an evacuated tube eventually showed the clear spectrum of helium.
Q 22The 1909 gold foil experiment was performed under Rutherford's direction by Hans Geiger and whom?
Ernest Marsden
Rutherford asked them to look for alphas bouncing back at very high angles, which no theory predicted.
Q 23Rutherford likened the gold foil result to a 15-inch shell bouncing back off what?
A piece of tissue paper
It led him to propose a tiny, charged nucleus holding most of the atom's mass.
Q 14What name did Rutherford and his McGill collaborator give the radioactive gas emitted by thorium?
Thoron
It later proved to be radon-220, an isotope of radon.
Q 15Which term did Rutherford coin for the time it takes a radioactive sample to decay to 50 per cent?
Half-life
His thoron samples always took eleven and a half minutes to halve, whatever their size.
Q 16Rutherford's 'Law of Radioactive Change' made what then-radical claim about radioactivity?
Atoms disintegrate spontaneously
Until then atoms had been assumed to be the indestructible basis of all matter.
Q 17What name did Rutherford give in 1903 to the penetrating radium radiation Paul Villard first noticed?
Gamma rays
He had already named alpha and beta rays in 1899; all three terms are still standard.
Q 18Rutherford's 1904 claim that radioactivity could power the Sun for aeons contradicted which physicist in the audience?
Lord Kelvin
Kelvin had argued for a much younger Earth on the grounds that no known energy source could last longer.
Q 19In 1907 Rutherford returned to Britain to take the Langworthy Professorship at which university?
Manchester
The nucleus, the proton and the first induced nuclear reaction all came out of his years there.
Q 20With Hans Geiger, Rutherford developed zinc sulphide what, for counting alpha particles?
Scintillation screens
Dividing total charge by the count told him each alpha carried a charge of two.
Q 24By counting scintillations, Rutherford determined the charge on an alpha particle to be what?
Two
He divided the total charge collected on the screen by the number of flashes.
Q 25During the First World War Rutherford worked on submarine detection using which effect?
Piezoelectricity
The work fed into modern ultrasound, though the claim that he invented sonar is a misconception.
Q 26With whom did Rutherford develop the atomic numbering system in 1913?
Henry Moseley
Their cathode-ray experiments showed each element responded in its own distinct way.
Q 27Rutherford's 1917 alpha-particle bombardment of nitrogen achieved the first artificial what?
Nuclear reaction
The nitrogen ejected a particle he first called a 'hydrogen atom'.
Q 28What did Rutherford name the hydrogen nucleus in 1920, proposing it as a building block of nuclei?
Proton
He had spent three years calling it the 'hydrogen atom' or 'positive electron'.
Q 29Patrick Blackett showed that Rutherford's nitrogen-plus-alpha reaction produced which element, alongside the ejected particle?
Oxygen
The nucleus, Rutherford noted, could grow in mass even as it expelled a proton.
Q 30Which particle did Rutherford christen in his 1920 Bakerian Lecture, long before Chadwick found it?
The neutron
He reasoned something neutral must stop the protons' repulsion from blowing nuclei apart.