Ernest Rutherford: Life of
Ernest Rutherford was born in Spring Grove in New Zealand on August 30th, 1871. His parents, James and Martha, had emigrated from Great Britain and believed their children, numbering 12, should have proper education. At the age of 16 Ernest won his first scholarship to Nelson College, where he was a popular student. He followed with a second scholarship to Canterbury College in Christchurch, and by 1893 had graduated with first class honours in Physics and Mathematics. Rutherford stayed at Canterbury for a further year to study Physics in more detail, particularly how iron reacted in magnetic fields. He also researched electromagnetic (wireless) waves, shortly after they were discovered by the German Heinrich Hertz, and produced two papers on his findings, winning another scholarship in England. When he arrived in Cambridge in 1895, Ernest worked for J.J. Thomson, a lecturer at Cambridge's 'Cavendish Laboratory'. He often wrote letters to his girlfriend, Mary Nelson, and his mother, and in these he depicts how some members of Cavendish were jealous of him, or so he thought. Everywhere Ernest went, he was recognized as being a leader and thinker, with 'amazing concentration'.
Unfortunately his daughter Eileen died in 1931, but he still liked playing golf, reading, and got along well with others, his fairness earning him the respect of his students and peers. Encyclopaedia Brittanica CD Rom, 1998 Edition. Rutherford began working on his own and discovered a formula for calculating the velocity and rate of joining of these particles. He produced more papers on this, which are still relevant to modern physics. 1911 saw Rutherford's greatest achievement, his nuclear theory of the atom. Hantaro Nagaoka presented a similar theorem in 1904 but it was not accepted, as it was widely believe that if electrons circumnavigated the nucleus they would radiate their energy, be pulled into the nucleus almost immediately, and lose their energy. However, in 1913 Neils Bohr found that electrons did orbit the nucleus without expelling any energy, proving Nagaoka and Rutherford's predictions right. World Book Encyclopedia, 1999 Edition. Late in 1895, after Rontgen had discovered x-rays, Thomson invited Ernest to join him in looking at how these x-rays passed through a gas. The discovery made was that x-rays made many ions, or electrically charged particles. These particles had either a positive or negative charge, and were therefore attracted to each other in the same fashion as the north and south poles of a magnet. When they joined together the charges evened out, and the particles h
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