Birth of Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was born on 30 August 1871 in Spring Grove. A New Zealand-born physicist, Rutherford is often called the father of nuclear physics. He identified alpha and beta radiation and, working with Frederick Soddy at McGill University, explained radioactivity as the transformation of one element into another, work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. At Manchester, experiments by his collaborators Geiger and Marsden led him to propose in 1911 that an atom has a tiny, dense nucleus. In 1917 he achieved the first artificial nuclear reaction by transforming nitrogen into oxygen, and he later led the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where many future Nobel laureates trained.

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