Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM FRS (30

[1]

August 1871 19 October 1937) was a New Zealandborn physicist andchemist who became known as the father [2] of nuclear physics. He is considered the greatest experimentalist [2] since Michael Faraday (17911867). In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and [3] beta radiation. This work was done at McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, [4] and the chemistry of radioactive substances". Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Roydsproved that alpha radiation [5][6] was helium ions. Rutherford performed his most famous work [4] after he became a Nobel laureate. In 1911, although he could not [7] prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms [8] have their charge concentrated in a very smallnucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering in hisgold foil experiment. He is widely credited with first "splitting the atom" in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen [9] and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton. Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919. Under his leadership the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932 and in the same year the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. After his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium(element 104) was named after him in 1997.

SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY:
Rutherfordium is a chemical element with symbol Rf and atomic number 104, named in honor of
physicist Ernest Rutherford. It is a synthetic element (an element that can be created in a laboratory but is not found in 267 nature) and radioactive; the most stable known isotope, Rf, has ahalf-life of approximately 1.3 hours. In the periodic table of the elements, it is a d-block element and the first of the period 4 transition elements. It is a member of the 7th period and belongs to the group 4 elements. Chemistry experiments have confirmed that rutherfordium behaves as the heavier homologue to hafnium in group 4. The chemical properties of rutherfordium are characterized only partly. They compare well with the chemistry of the other group 4 elements, even though some calculations had indicated that the element might show significantly different properties due to relativistic effects. In the 1960s, small amounts of rutherfordium were produced in laboratories in the former Soviet Union and in California. The priority of the discovery and therefore the naming of the element was disputed between Soviet and American scientists, and it was not until 1997 that International (IUPAC) established rutherfordium as the official name for the element.