Ernest Rutherford (Ern to family and friends) was the son of a Scottish farmer and an English schoolteacher who had both made the perilous 6-month boat ride to New Zealand as children (dad at 4 years, mom at 13).
When Ern was 5 they moved to a farm in a town called Foxhill, to “raise a little flax and a lot of children[2]”. As Ernest was the fourth of twelve children, the second part was certainly true. Ern always excelled at school, but also was a rough and tumble country boy who enjoyed rugby and fishing and everything except dancing which he inexplicably detested[3].
His mother insisted that “all knowledge is power” although Rutherford put it as, “We didn’t have the money so we had to think. [4]” With several scholarships, Rutherford got a master’s degree in mathematics and science and a bachelor of science degree in chemistry and geology.
At the time New Zealand had a total of 126 engineers in the entire province (it wasn’t a country at the time), so Rutherford decided to become a schoolteacher, which was not a success. A former student recalled, “He was entirely hopeless as a schoolmaster [and] disorder prevailed in his classes.”
When a student was sent out for misbehaving, they only had to, “stay out of the classroom long enough for Rutherford’s enormous mind to have bulged in some other direction, sneak back to his seat and he would inevitably not be noticed. [5]”
In 1888, Rutherford’s father moved the family again and Ern stayed at a boardinghouse, where he eventually fell in love with the landlady’s daughter, Mary Newton. In 1894, Ern asked Mary for her hand in marriage, but Mary wisely refused as she didn’t want to “be a handicap” to his education, saying, it, “would be idiotic,” to get married. However, she would wait for him, telling Rutherford, “I wouldn’t dream of marrying anyone else.”
At the same time, Rutherford then decided to publish his work on magnetizing iron with radio waves in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand. To give you a sense of how important Physics was in New Zealand at the time, his article was published in the “Miscellaneous” section, the same section as an article about preserving human heads[6]!
In August of 1895, Rutherford sailed to England and sent his paper to the famous JJ Thomson who was the head of the Cavendish laboratories as Thomson had just changed the rules at Cavendish to let “aliens”, or non-Cambridge graduates go to graduate school there.
Thomson immediately hired Rutherford and Rutherford found his new boss to be, “very pleasant” and “not fossilized at all”. However, Rutherford found his fellow students to be another matter, writing Mary, “They snigger at us… I’d like to do a Maori war-dance on the chest of one and will do that in the future if things don’t mend.” However, after a couple of months, Rutherford was asked to give a public talk.
Once again he wrote Mary, “My paper before the Physical Society was a heavy blow to their assumed superiority and now they all offer to help us in any way they can.”
Rutherford arrived in England at quite the opportune time. Just months after his arrival, on January 5th of 1896, the papers carried a strange story that vacuum tubes called Crookes tubes could make powerful invisible rays that their discoverer, Wilhelm Roentgen, named x-rays.
Soon, as Rutherford recalled later, “Every laboratory in the world took out its old Crookes tubes to produce x-rays, and the Cavendish Laboratory was no exception.[7]” Rutherford had been working on transmitting signals with radio waves but was convinced by JJ Thomson to switch to the effects of x-rays on gasses (they called x-rays Roentgen rays after its inventor).
By April 24, 1896, Rutherford wrote Mary, “I am working with the professor this term on Roentgen rays. I am a little full up on my old subject and glad of the change.[8]” Rutherford was working with Thomson while Thomson discovered the electron. Now they knew that everything was filled with these teeny tiny negatively charged particles that were at least 1700 times smaller than the smallest atom.
However, they didn’t know what these things had to do with the nature of the atom. Were they part of an atom or just extra things flowing around? How in the world did all of this work?
Meanwhile, in France, a wealthy third-generation scientist named Henri Becquerel had found that uranium would spontaneously produce rays that, like x-rays, could go through the thick paper and develop film. Then a Polish immigrant to France named Marie Curie decided to study “Uranium rays” for her dissertation and, using the fact that these rays made gasses electrically conductive had used a sensitive electroscope and found that Thorium also produced these rays and named this process “radio-activity”.
She also found that there must be some tiny amounts of new elements, Polonium, and Radium, hidden in ore. Now, the search was on to use Chemistry to isolate these new elements. Rutherford, however, had no interest in Chemistry, famously saying, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” However, as Rutherford had been studying the effects of x-rays on gasses, he thought he might also study the effects of radioactivity on gasses.
Rutherford put a bit of uranium on a plate separated by another plate by air and measured the current that flowed between the plates as a measure of the radioactivity, a method he copied from Marie Curie. Then, to systematically study the strength of the radiation, Rutherford measured the current as he added layers of thin metal foil in the way of the uranium rays. The results were very strange.
At first, the thin layers of metal would quickly diminish the strength of the current. But then, after a while, the amount seemed almost constant. What was going on? On September 1, 1898, Rutherford published his conclusion: “uranium radiation is complex, and there are present at least two distinct types of radiation – one that is readily absorbed, which will be termed for convenience the alpha radiation, and the other of a more penetrative character, which will be termed the beta radiation.”[9]
The very next year a French physicist named Paul Villard was given some radium to study by the Curies and discovered a third, even more, powerful ray, that Rutherford eventually called gamma radiation (as alpha, beta, and gamma, are the first three letters of the Greek alphabet).
[If you are still confused about Rutherford’s experiment, let me explain further, at first, the layers of metal were blocking the alpha particles so that more metal equals less radiation until all of the alpha particles were blocked. However, beta and gamma radiation can go through much more material, so adding more layers of metal leaves didn’t really reduce radiation further.]
At around the same time that Rutherford was discovering alpha and beta radiation, a Physics professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada retired. Naturally, the department head wrote JJ Thomson and asked his advice on whom to hire to replace him. Thomson wrote back, “I have never had a student with more enthusiasm or ability for original research than Mr. Rutherford.[10]” Rutherford was a little hesitant to leave Cambridge, however, he felt the lingering prejudice against him as an outsider would keep him from getting a fellowship.
Rutherford quickly became excited about the possibility of “having a swell lab[11]” so that he could “knock the shine out of the Yankees![12]” Also, with this new position he finally earned enough money to get married writing Mary, “Rejoice with me, my dear girl, for matrimony is looming in the distance.[13]” Still, it took another year and a half to arrange the finances for their long-awaited marriage.
At McGill, an electrical engineer named “Bobby” Owens asked Rutherford for advice on what to study for an upcoming exhibition. Rutherford suggested examining the radiation from thorium oxide in the same way that Rutherford had studied uranium.
To their shock, “The radiation from thorium oxide was not constant, but varied in a most capricious manner”, whereas “All the compounds of Uranium give out radiation which is remarkably constant.[14]” Rutherford took over the research and quickly found that “this inconstancy is due to slow currents of air produced in an open room.[15]” But that was crazy, no radiation that they had ever found would blow hither and thither with the breeze!
Rutherford decided the thorium must have been emanating a gas and this gas must be radioactive and decay within minutes! JJ Thomson: “the discovery at McGill of the emanation of thorium was a stroke of genius because the new gas had to be endowed with properties not recognized as belonging to any such known substance, as it is a gas which exists for a few minutes only; half of what there is of it always disappears in less than a minute!”
Not only had Rutherford discovered the new element eventually called Radon, but he also discovered the decay pattern of radioactive materials and came up with the idea of the half-life!
In March of 1901, Rutherford debated the existence of electrons against a young chemist named Fredrick Soddy[16]. Soddy not only lost the debate but decided to devote himself to helping Rutherford in his studies (a full 19 of Rutherford’s papers in the next 3 years were co-authored by Soddy). Soddy went to work on determining the properties of radon. In 1902, he tried to get it to react to any other element, but it stubbornly refused, meaning that it had to be a noble gas.
Soddy then thought it must be Argon gas (although, it turned out to be a new noble gas). He recalled in his biography, “I remember quite well standing there transfixed as though stunned by the colossal import of the thing and blurting out…’Rutherford, the Thorium is disintegrating and transmuting itself into an argon gas.’ Rutherford replied, “For Mike’s sake, Soddy, don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists… Make it a transformation.[17]”
Soddy then helped Rutherford use this transformation and the knowledge of “half-life” to determine the age of inanimate objects, including the Earth itself! In 1904, Soddy got a job at the University of Glasgow and their partnership waned although their friendship was as strong as ever.
Rutherford was incredibly successful but Rutherford still felt “rather out of things” in Canada, complaining to JJ Thomson that, “this feeling of isolation is the great drawback to colonial appointments.[18]” Finally, in 1907, Rutherford was awarded a job at the University of Manchester and happily went back to the UK where Rutherford gained a new assistant named Hans Geiger. [Discover the nature of alpha particles]
Even at this new “equipment and apparatus were very simple. We built our own beta and gamma-ray electroscopes out of large tin cans, on which were placed smaller tobacco or cigarette tins[19]”
Rutherford was then surprised to find that in 1908 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances” (he was particularly surprised as he wasn’t a Chemist). Unlike the Curies, however, Rutherford loved the fame and attention, and he wrote that he and his wife “had the time of our lives,” in Sweden.
Five years later, he was knighted and made a Lord, and told his 13-year-old daughter Eileen, “Henceforth, young lady, you may address me as ‘Sir Ernest’”. Rutherford, however, was not about to sit on his laurels, he had secrets of the universe to discover. First was proving the nature of those alpha particles.
In 1907 the cost to produce a gram of radium was over 100,000 dollars!
The quickest transformation was the Nobel committee’s “instantaneous transmutation” of him from a physicist to a chemist!
“Geiger is a demon at the work of counting scintillations and could count at intervals for a whole night without destroying his equanimity. I damned vigorously and retired after two minutes[20]”
Roomed next to French physicist Paul Langevin (who ended up being Marie Curie’s lover after her husband’s early death). When Langevin was asked if they were friends, he replied, “One can hardly speak of being friendly with a force of nature”
August of 1895
He loved to talk, and when one of his portraits was revealed, his wife remarked that she was stunned the artist had managed to capture him with his mouth shut!
Rutherford did a series of experiments to determine what these radiations were[1]. Eventually, he determined that Alpha radiation was helium stripped of two electrons (or a helium nucleus). Beta radiation turned out to be fast-moving cathode rays, in other words, speedy electrons. Gamma radiation turned out to be a high-energy electromagnetic wave, like x-rays but more powerful and more deadly.
Anyway, in his desire to figure out all about the different types of radiation, Rutherford wanted to measure the charge for an alpha particle and, in order to do that, he wanted to measure how many alpha particles he was getting overtime. Working with a young German scientist named Hans Geiger they attempted to create a machine that would count how many alpha particles they had[2].
Unfortunately, the particles seemed to be scattered by the air molecules in the chamber. Rutherford thought that was strange, as he knew that air particles were very heavy compared to his alpha particles. Therefore, he decided to recreate Hertz’s experiment by bombarding a thin gold foil, but this time bombarding them with alpha particles instead of cathode rays.
January 27, 1908 “We have detected a single alpha particle by an electric method… The method is to fire an alpha particle into a small hole covered with thin mica into a cylinder about 60 cm long where the air pressure is about 30 cm. There is a thin central wire and a voltage is applied of about 1000 until a discharge almost passes. Under such conditions, the ionization produced in the gas by the alpha particle is magnified 2000 times by collision. The effect of each alpha particle is marked enough to show an audience”
At first, Rutherford and Geiger did find that the alpha particles went through thin pieces of gold and wrote a paper about how this occurred. However, in 1909, Geiger asked Rutherford if he thought that Geiger’s graduate student named Marsden should do some research on the project.
Rutherford suggested that Marsden study the large scattering of the particles, basically, as a way to help him be familiar with the equipment as “we knew that the alpha particle was a very fast massive particle, with a great deal of energy…[so] the chance of an alpha particle’s being scattered backward was very small[21].” A few days later, Geiger told the astonished Rutherford that some of the alpha particles did bounce backward!
Rutherford recalled, “It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.[22]” Rutherford decided that the alpha particles that bounced back must have hit something very massive and positive in the gold. Thomson’s “plum pudding” model was completely wrong.
Electrons are not swimming in a “sea” of positive charges. Instead, all the positive charges (which is almost all the mass) must be in a tiny spot in the middle of the atom that Rutherford called the nucleus in 1911.
It was like looking at a forest from a distance, it might seem like a solid wall of the forest, but if you walked into it, you could see that it is composed of trees that can be quite distant from their neighbor.
Of course, this analogy makes one’s head hurt when one gets to the dimensions of actual nuclei in atoms.
See, Rutherford found that about one in 20,000 alpha particles “bounced back”. From this, he extrapolated that the nucleus must be about smaller than the ??, as if the nucleus was the width of a tree, in the middle of San Francisco, the next tree would be in Stanford University, over 30 miles away! And between them, a whole bunch of nothing.
Rutherford concluded by the percentage of alpha particles that bounced that gold (and all objects) are 99.999999999999999 percent nothing with the 0.0000000000000001 percent in a very tiny spot, the ridiculously tiny nucleus [The electrons are so small they don’t count]. To put it another way “if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only about the size of a fly.[23]” It is a mind-boggling thought.
So, if everything is basically nothing then why don’t I just fall through my chair? Well, it comes back to those pesky electric forces again. The electrons in the atoms in your pants push against the electrons in the atoms in the chair when they get close enough to each other. It turns out that even things we thought were touching are actually action-at-a distance. Just a really, really, really small distance.
By 1920, Rutherford determined that these nuclei were filled with protons (massive positive particles), where the number of protons tells you what material you have. By the 1930s other scientists added Neutrons (or massive neutral particles) to the nucleus that act like glue to hold the positive charges together.
And if you think that it is strange, the world of Physics was about to go completely bat shit crazy. And although a lot of it is the fault of a third rank patent clerk by the name of Einstein and his put upon the first wife.
See more here: kathylovesphysics
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers,
This article describes the most important experiment ever devised by a human! For more than a century we (humans) had generally accepted that matter was composed of atoms and therefore was not endlessly divisible. However, for more than a century we had no idea of what an atom was. We knew there was electricity (electrons–negatively charged particles) and we knew there were positively charged particles (protons) so that atoms were electrically neutral. But Rutherford’s experimental results forced the conclusion that an atoms was mainly empty space. And the rest is history.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Andy Rowlands
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Yep, and the space between atoms can be compared to the distances between stars. As Carl Sagan said; matter is composed essentially of nothing.
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Moffin
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And them naughty old planets are like electrons around the nucleus.
Earth is negatively charged. (except for a small radius around thunder storms.)
And around 80% of solar wind is positively charged.
Naughty!!!!
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Moffin,
Where do you consider the electrons (negative charges).ended up?
Have a good day, Jerry
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Moffin
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Hi Jerry.
Your question is all a bit beyond me.
I have read that scientists can measure the electric charge of the earth change in real time as a solar wind arrives from a coronal mass ejection.
There appears to be some influence between weather and high solar wind activity as well as atmospheric plasma but I do not know how much is speculative and how much is replicable data.
Cheers. Moffin the unknowledgeable.
Jerry Krause
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Hi Andy,
“As Carl Sagan said; matter is composed essentially of nothing.”
Where and when did he say this? For I would like to read what else he said near (at) the same time.
Have a good day, Jerry
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MattH
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“I don’t want to believe. I want to know.”
― Carl Sagan
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”
― Carl Sagan
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
― Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Matt,
Thank you!!! Thank you!!! You have convinced me that Sagan was not STUPID as I had been assuming. You have done what I asked (assigned) as a Teacher. You did the literature search which it seems others did make the EFFORT to do. Of course, I, the teacher, should have done this before you, the student, did.
However, two are better than one. I have referred to the meeting that Neils Bohr requested to have with the young Richard Feynman at Los Alamos to SCREEN his (Bohr’s) possible stupid ideas. Bohr has proposed his planetary model of the atom and it worked for the hydrogen atom. Bohr had moved on to the helium atom, and discovered by himself (I assume) that it did not work. So Bohr knew his ideas could be wrong. Lots of people (Scientists even) have never discovered that their ideas could be wrong.
While I could use mathematics as a tool, I knew that I have never understood calculus as a real mathematician (Newton and the other guy (do not remember his name) who believed he was the only person at that time who could. Hence this other guy, with an ego, accused Newton of plagiarism. Bohr had no such problem (ego).
You are a friend who works with me for I know I make mistakes daily.
Have a good day, Jerry
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MattH
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Every body should be taught, : “We didn’t have the money so we had to think.’
Thinking is done by the analysis (pro’s and con’s) of competing potential solutions, not so much by discussion or debate.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Matt,
I had read your comment—“Every body should be taught, : “We didn’t have the money so we had to think.” Thinking is done by the analysis (pro’s and con’s) of competing potential solutions, not so much by discussion or debate.” But I hadn’t carefully read what Kathy had written. So I did not I connect Rutherford’s statement with that his mother who insisted that “all knowledge is power” although Rutherford put it as, “We didn’t have the money so we had to think.”
Until after WWII most all farmers, wherever they farmed, were poor relative to the non-farmers who had knowledge and ran (created) the economy. However, it seems Rutherford did not appreciate what he had learned as a farmer’s son. For Kathy wrote: “Supposedly, when Rutherford got the news he was working at the family farm and threw down his shovel, exclaiming, “That’s the last potato I’ll ever dig.”
I have read that some companies will not hire a recent engineering graduate if he has no preactical experience of growing up on a farm or keeping his old wreck of a car running. I read how archeologists apparently do not understand how ancient people survived so long ago as these ancient people had to have practically thought to survive. It is as if these scholars never ask: Where did we come from???
If you read Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences you will find Galileo was writing to the practical artisans of Florence, Italy at that time and not to the philosophers and theologians who could read Latin. And from modern history we know that alchemists were actively working with their furnaces (fire) to make gold from air, water, and earth. And the archeologists have observed that these alchemists had been making glass, or fired clay tablets, at time of Galileo for the preceding 1500 years or more.
Sorry, I did not compliment you earlier for what you read and I did not. But first one must see!!!
Have a good day, Jerry
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Robert Beatty
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Lord Ernest Rutherford of Nelson is a famous graduate of Nelson Boys College located at Nelson in the Tasman Bay region of the NZ South Island. I also attended that college in the late 50s and enjoyed studying at this respected institution.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers,
This may be a repeat but I cannot find it.
A few days ago, I found a copy of THE MEANING OF IT ALL (1998) by Richard P. Feynman. It is a transcript of a three lecture series, the John Dana Lectures, given at the University of Washington April 23, April 25, April 27, 1963. The titles of the lectures were: The Uncertainty of Science, The Uncertainty of Values, and The Uncertainty Age. It seems we are now living in The Uncertainty Age. Given this I would encourage PSI Readers to get an inexpensive used copy (Abe’s Books). An example, from the first lecture, follows.
“This is the excitement, the pay you get for all the disciplined thinking and hard work. The work is not done for the sake of an application. It is done for the excitement of what is found out. … But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. No one who did not have some inkling of this through observations could have imagined such a marvel as nature is. … If you look closely enough at anything, you will see that there is nothing more exciting than the truth, the pay dirt of the scientist, discovered by his painstaking efforts. … This method is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea. But “prove” used in this way really means “test,” … The exceptions to any rule are most interesting in themselves, for they show us that the old rule is wrong. … The scientist tries to find more exceptions, a process that is continually exciting as it develops. He does not try to avoid showing that rules are wrong; there is progress and excitement in the exact opposite. He tries to prove himself wrong as quickly as possible. … Scientific reasoning requires a certain discipline, and we should try to teach this discipline, because even on the lowest level such errors are unnecessary today. … There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.”
Have a good day, Jerry
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RockyTSquirrel
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the interesting part of researchers to me,
is the thinking process they use,
to develop a “process” to make a discovery..
Their ability to look at a question, from outside the box of average thinkers,
to approach the question from a totally unexpected direction..
Inspiration from “out of the blue”, is always a fascinating thing to behold…
. . .
(as requested, this is an opinion and or SARCASM)
“Let’s Go, Brandon” (F.J.B.)
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K Kaiser
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Hello Kathy Joseph,
Thank you for this most pleasurable read and interesting information on the history of E. Rutherford and colleagues’ work, radioactivity, elements, etc.
Best regards,
KK
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Jerry Krause
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Hi KK and PSI Readers,
Seemingly, Rutherford had a prejudice about the value of chemistry “Rutherford, however, had no interest in Chemistry, famously saying, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” “ This, even though we read: “With several scholarships, Rutherford got a master’s degree in mathematics and science and a bachelor of science degree in chemistry and geology.”
You [KK] are a chemist and I am a chemist and we know that Rutherford had been exposed to the Periodic Law. “Periodic Law is considered to be one of the most important concepts in chemistry. Every chemist makes use of Periodic Law, whether consciously or not, when dealing with the chemical elements, their properties, and their chemical reactions. Periodic Law led to the development of the modern periodic table. … Periodic Law was formulated based on observations made by scientists in the 19th century. In particular, contributions made by Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Mendeleev made trends in element properties apparent. They independently proposed Periodic Law in 1869. The periodic table arranged the elements to reflect Periodic Law, even though scientists at the time had no explanation for why properties followed a trend. (https://www.thoughtco.com/definition-of-periodic-law-605900) At Cornell University I met (about 1970) a post-doc physicist who admitted he had no understanding of this ‘chart’ that chemists hang on their lecture room walls and place inside the covers of their introductory textbooks. And I went to the link kathylovesphysics and she seems to have little respect for chemistry and chemists also. As evidenced by “She [Marie Curie] also found that there must be some tiny amounts of new elements, Polonium, and Radium, hidden in ore. Now, the search was on to use Chemistry to isolate these new elements.” As if this was not ‘pure’ experimental chemistry.
And Kathy also seems to have some prejudice about Einstein as she concludes her article: “And if you think that it is strange, the world of Physics was about to go completely bat shit crazy. And although a lot of it is the fault of a third rank patent clerk by the name of Einstein and his put upon the first wife.” I do not understand what she is implying about Einstein and his ideas and how it could be related to Rutherford and the famous experimental result which pointed to the nuclear atom.
Have a good day, Jerry
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