How Did Ernest Rutherford's Work

rnest Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871, in Spring Grove, on the South Island of New Zealand. Rutherford resided in a family of 12 children, whose mother was a teacher and strongly believed in a good education for her children. Without this education, Rutherford would not have affected the atomic structure as much as he did. Rutherford, specializing in Physics, in 1895 was the very first research student at University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory in London. While at the Cavendish Lab, Rutherford worked with fellow scientist J.J. Thompson and studied the effects of X-Rays on the conductivity of gases and dividing atoms into molecules and atoms. While still at Cambridge, Rutherford focused on uranium and found that by placing it near …show more content…
Through experiments during his professorship, Rutherford fired alpha particles at foil and expected them to pass through the foil with minimal deflection, but they did not and some of the particles were deflected or some bounced back. This experiment resulted in a groundbreaking discovery and Rutherford's Nuclear Atomic Model. In his model, most of the total mass of an atom is concentrated in the nucleus, most of the volume of an atom is empty space in which electrons are dispersed, and the number of electrons outside the nucleus was equal to the number of positively charged particles inside the nucleus. Through the gold foil experiments he was able to discover the atomic nucleus, which housed most of the atom’s mass, and later the proton in 1917, which was the positively charged particle in the nucleus. In his discovery of the proton, Rutherford converted nitrogen atoms into oxygen atoms by crowding nitrogen with alpha particles. While Rutherford’s Atomic Model was not necessarily correct, it lay down a foundation for the model of the atom, which would be corrected in the future, and was an important step in creating the nuclear model for all atoms. Most importantly, Rutherford’s Nuclear Atomic Model helped Bohr create his Planetary Model, which is close to the model that we use to describe atoms today, and the discovery of the neutron. From his important discoveries, Rutherford was dubbed the name “The Father of Nuclear Physics” and I would like to know why he was first interested in atoms and atomic structure in the first place, and what led him to using the gold foil model to study