aug 19, 1895 - Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937)

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Contributions: Ernest Rutherford is considered the father of nuclear physics. With his gold foil experiment he was able to unlock the mysteries of the atomic structure. He received the nobel prize in chemistry in 1908.
In 1909 at the University of Manchester, Rutherford was bombarding a piece of gold foil with Alpha particles. Rutherford noted that although most of the particles went straight through the foil, one in every eight thousand was deflected back. "It was as if you fired a fifteen inch naval shell at a piece of tissue paper and the shell came right back and hit you," Rutherford said. He concluded that though an atom consists of mostly empty space, most of its mass is concentrated in a very small positively charged region known as the nucleus, while electrons buzz around on the outside.
Rutherford was also able to observe that radioactive elements underwent a process of decay over time which varied from element to element. In 1919, Rutherford used alpha particles to transmutate one element (Oxygen) into another element (Nitrogen). Papers at the time called it "splitting the atom."

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