jan 2, 1911 - Ernest Rutherford (1911 AD)
Description:
Ernest Rutherford, Lord Rutherford of Nelson (1871-1937) was a British physicist. He excelled especially in math and science in school. In his early career, he worked with JJ Thompson on an investigation on how recently discovered X-rays changed the conductivity of gases. After being offered a chair at the University of Manchester, in England, he worked with German physicist Hans Geiger to conduct his famous experiment regarding the scattering of alpha particles. He fired some of these particles at a thin sheet of gold. Many of these particles simply passed through the sheet, but however, a small number were deflected away from the sheet. This meant that a gold atom must have had it's mass concentrated in a small, dense nucleus. His model described the nucleus of an atom as consisting of protons. It also included electrons orbiting the nucleus of the atom. The rest of the atom was mostly empty space. Unfortunately, WWI saw Rutherford's work on atomic theory halted, and during this time he worked for the British Admiralty in anti-submarine research and other naval fields. After the war, he researched nuclear reactions for the rest of his career.
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History of atomic theory
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