We explain who Ernest Rutherford was and what his main contributions to science were that earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Rutherford was a prominent British chemist and physicist, considered the father of nuclear physics.
Who was Ernest Rutherford?
Ernest Rutherford, also known as Lord Rutherford, He was a prominent British physicist and chemist, of New Zealand origin.a scholar of radioactivity who was responsible for demonstrating the existence of a nucleus in the structure of atoms. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.
Author of the atomic model that bears his name, Rutherford is considered the father of nuclear physics, since his discoveries laid the foundations for all subsequent studies into the nature of the atom. Without his discoveries, the fission of the atomic nucleus would not have been possible, nor would its applications (such as nuclear energy or the atomic bomb).
Rutherford was an active researcher during the first part of his life, while the second part was devoted to teaching and running the Cavendish Laboratories at the University of Cambridge. There he was the teacher of other important physicists, such as Niels Bohr (1885-1962) and Otto Hahn (1879-1968). He is considered one of the greatest experimental chemists in history, along with Michael Faraday (1791-1867).
Childhood and formative years of Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871 in the town of Spring Grove, Nelson, New Zealand.. He was the fourth child of twelve born to Scottish mechanic James Rutherford and his English wife Martha Thompson, who was a schoolteacher.
Rutherford grew up in a poor home and, when he was five, he moved with his family to a small farm in the town of Foxhill, where he began attending the local public school. Then, at the age of eleven, he moved to Havelock, near the Ruapaka River, where his father found employment operating a mill.
Young Ernest soon demonstrated his great talent for study.. He was a brilliant student, especially gifted in mathematics, which in 1887 earned him a Marlborough State scholarship to study at Nelson Collegiate School, a private institution. There, in addition to being a brilliant student, he joined the rugby team and won one of the 10 national scholarships to enter the University of New Zealand.
At university, Ernest first became interested in science. He joined scientific and debate clubs, where he made his first discoveries, related to the magnetization of iron through high frequencies.. His university studies culminated in 1893 and he then obtained the only scholarship available in his country to study applied mathematics.
Thanks to this last funding, Rutherford continued his university studies for another year, focusing on the fields of physics and mathematics, under the tutelage of Professor Alexander Bickerton (1842-1929). There Rutherford resumed his experiences with iron to design different pulse-modulation and measurement devices and electrical circuits, and published his first works. papers in academic journals.
At the end of 1893 he was already a recognized researcher among his peers. The following year he studied geology and chemistry at Canterbury College and obtained his degree in 1895. Bachelor in Science. At the age of 23, he already had three university degrees and, lacking opportunities to enter New Zealand academia, he decided to go abroad.
In 1895, Ernest applied for an international scholarship, thanks to which he was awarded a place at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. There he continued his training alongside the British physicist Joseph John Thomson (1856-1940), a student of electromagnetic radiation who, two years later, revolutionized the scientific world by discovering the electron.
At that time, in addition, Rutherford met Mary Newton, a university student, to whom he became engaged before leaving for England. They married five years later and in 1901 had their only daughter, Eileen.
Rutherford’s life in England and Canada
Rutherford made the discoveries that earned him the Nobel Prize in Great Britain.
Between 1895 and 1898, Rutherford worked at the University of Cambridge, dedicated to the study of different fields of physics, under the tutelage of Thomson. Initially, He dedicated himself to the ionization of gases using the newly discovered X-rays, and invented a novel technique to measure the recombination rate of ions.
In 1896, however, his interest shifted to radioactive atoms and radioactivity, and He discovered the emission of two different types of energy, which he named alpha rays and beta rays.
This occurred when Rutherford was 27 years old and accepted an offer to join the physics professorship at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. There he had a very well-equipped laboratory and was able to carry out his own studies, focused on radioactivity, taking advantage of the international interest that had been aroused in the subject by the discovery, in 1896, of the so-called “uranic radiation” by Henri Becquerel ( 1852-1908).
Between 1902 and 1903, Rutherford’s studies in Montreal yielded their first results: a theory on the disintegration (“transformation” at that time) of chemical elements capable of generating radioactivity.. For this he collaborated with the British Frederick Soddy (1877-1956), the American Bertram Borden Boltwood (1870-1927) and the German Otto Hahn (1879-1968).
Rutherford and his collaborators demonstrated that radioactive atoms were unstable and therefore emitted alpha (high energy, poorly penetrating) and beta (low energy, very penetrating) particles, according to three different patterns that allowed their classification into three families: that of uranium (U), that of actinium (Ac) and that of thorium (Th).
These findings also allowed Rutherford to ask important questions regarding the energetic nature of the Sun and the components of the Earth.. During the following years he was catapulted to scientific stardom, especially after the publication of his book Radioactivity 1904. That same year he received the Rumford Medal from the British Royal Scientific Society.
The discovery of the atomic nucleus
At the University of Manchester, Rutherford worked closely with Hans Giger.
Fame opened new horizons for Rutherford: in 1907 he returned to England, hired by the University of Manchester, to continue his research with the German physicist Hans Geiger (1882-1945), who was dedicated to the production of a device capable of counting the ionized particles emitted by radioactive materials. This device, in whose design Rutherford collaborated, ended up becoming the Geiger counter years later..
Thanks to these advances, in 1908 Rutherford managed to demonstrate that alpha radiation consists of the emission of what at that time appear to be helium (He) atoms. This discovery, together with his previous discoveries, earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry that same year..
However, his greatest contribution to science occurred in 1911, when, as a result of some research experiences carried out with a student, the idea was formulated for the first time that atoms did not consist of a uniform structure, but rather that their Mass was concentrated in an inner core. This is how Rutherford’s atomic model was born.
That same year, he was also invited to the first Solvay Congress, which brought together a group of scientists and scholars in Brussels to discuss the subject of radioactivity. Rutherford was joined by Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), Marie Curie (1867-1934) and her husband Pierre (1859-1906), Max Planck (1858-1947) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), among others.
Although Rutherford’s findings received little attention initially, in 1913 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had been a student of Rutherford in 1912, demonstrated to the world their enormous importance: radioactivity, Bohr explained, resides in the nucleus of the atom, while the chemical properties depend on its outer shell, where the electrons are found.
Rutherford’s atomic model
Rutherford’s atomic model revolutionized the understanding of matter at the time.
At the time Rutherford formulated his atomic model, many other scientists were dedicated to better understanding the structure of the atom. The prevailing view in the scientific community was that atoms were more or less homogeneous units. and that their electrical charges were distributed in them uniformly.
Thus, in 1904, Rutherford’s former professor, JJ Thomson, had formulated his own model of atoms.According to this model, atoms consisted of a positively charged body (proton) on whose surface negatively charged electrons were embedded, like raisins in a pudding.
Rutherford’s model, on the other hand, proposed that atoms had a rather loose structure, with electron clouds orbiting a small, positively charged nucleus, which contained 99.99% of the atomic mass. Rutherford calculated that the electron orbits formed a complex structure within a radius ten thousand times larger than the size of the nucleus, which meant that the atom was actually mostly empty. This was a revolutionary idea for the physics of the time..
Rutherford’s atomic model was key to a greater understanding of the nature of matter, but also to the formulation of later laws, such as the weak and strong nuclear forces. Furthermore, applied retroactively to Rutherford’s findings on radiation, It was possible to understand that alpha radiation does not consist of helium atoms, but of helium atomic nuclei..
This atomic model, however, was soon displaced by the model proposed by Niels Bohr, which solved certain problems of electrodynamics that Rutherford’s model could not explain. Even so, Bohr’s model is considered to have been an improvement on his teacher’s model.
These findings on the composition of matter were key to the debate at the Second Solvay Congress, held in 1913.. The following year, however, World War I broke out and the scientific laboratories were emptied. Rutherford devoted himself to electromagnetic experimentation, trying to design a device to detect submarines.
The postwar period and the return to Cavendish
After the war, Rutherford participated in the Third Solvay Congress in 1921.
The end of the war in 1918 returned Rutherford to his research. In 1919 he achieved the first artificial atomic transmutation, that is, the first transformation of a nitrogen atom into an oxygen atom, by bombarding it with alpha radiation. This experiment received a lot of worldwide attention and Rutherford was considered a modern alchemist, that is, a savant capable of transforming one element into another..
That same year,…