August 30th is Ernest Rutherford's birthday. Rutherford was an English physicist who was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to radiation chemistry. He discovered and named alpha and beta decay and coined the terms alpha, beta, and gamma ray radiation.
He was a mentor to many important names of nuclear physics. One was James Chadwick, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935 for discovering the neutron which Rutherford had predicted to exist. Another was Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922 for the theory of how electrons orbited Rutherford's nucleus. John Cockroft and Ernest Walton, the team that built the first high energy accelerator, Robert Oppenheimer, later to be known as the father of the atomic bomb, and Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger tube to detect radiation all worked under Rutherford's direction at Cambridge.
He is a national hero in his native New Zealand where his likeness is on the $100 note. Find out more about this influential man and what else occurred on this day in science history.
He was a mentor to many important names of nuclear physics. One was James Chadwick, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935 for discovering the neutron which Rutherford had predicted to exist. Another was Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922 for the theory of how electrons orbited Rutherford's nucleus. John Cockroft and Ernest Walton, the team that built the first high energy accelerator, Robert Oppenheimer, later to be known as the father of the atomic bomb, and Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger tube to detect radiation all worked under Rutherford's direction at Cambridge.
He is a national hero in his native New Zealand where his likeness is on the $100 note. Find out more about this influential man and what else occurred on this day in science history.
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