Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei. Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering by the gold foil experiment of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden. He performed the first artificially induced nuclear reaction in 1917 in experiments where nitrogen nuclei were bombarded with alpha particles.
Introduction
Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford | Introduction
He was  a New Zealand–born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. A New Zealand–born British physicist A New Zealand–born British physicist He was a New Zealand–born British physicist.
who was lise meitner?
user
She was an Austrian-Swedish physicist.
assistant
in which country did she live in her early days?
user
In the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna
assistant
any particular educational institution that she attended as a student?
user
University of Vienna
assistant
why did she have to flee from germany?
user
Because she lost her Austrian citizenship.
assistant
why?
user
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context.
assistant
can you mention any of her contributions?
user
She completed the work on beta ray spectrum that she had begun with Hahn and Baeyer, and also her own study of the uranium decay chain.
assistant
could you please elaborate the last reaction?
user
It refers to a series of radioactive decays of different radioactive decay products as a sequential series of transformations - a.k.a. "radioactive cascade".
assistant
can you mention any health hazard caused by this decay?
user
The dangers are not immediately recognized.
assistant
who discovered this decay?
user
Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Soddy
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who was the former?
user
He found that a sample of this radioactive material of any size invariably took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay – its "half-life" (11½ minutes in this case). From 1900 to 1903, he was joined at McGill by the young chemist Frederick Soddy (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1921) for whom he set the problem of identifying the thorium emanations. Once he had eliminated all the normal chemical reactions, Soddy suggested that it must be one of the inert gases, which they named thoron (later found to be an isotope of radon). They also found another type of thorium they called Thorium X, and kept on finding traces of helium.
Ernest Rutherford | Scientific research
As a result, he discovered the emission of a subatomic particle which, in 1919, he called the "hydrogen atom" but, in 1920, he more accurately named the proton.
Ernest Rutherford | Introduction
Rutherford named these fragments of ejected nucleus alpha particles. Rutherford realised that if an atom is losing protons, its identity is changing at the same time, since an atom's identity is governed by its proton number. Radioactive decay causes atoms of one element to transmute into atoms of a "different" element. He then sought to artificially engineer a specific transmutation.
Chemistry: A Volatile History | Ernest Rutherford explains radioactivity
In 1900 he became a demonstrator in chemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he worked with Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity. He and Rutherford realized that the anomalous behaviour of radioactive elements was because they decayed into other elements. This decay also produced alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. When radioactivity was first discovered, no one was sure what the cause was. It needed careful work by Soddy and Rutherford to prove that atomic transmutation was in fact occurring. In 1903, with Sir William Ramsay at University College London, Soddy showed that the decay of radium produced helium gas. In the experiment a sample of radium was enclosed in a thin-walled glass envelope sited within an evacuated glass bulb.
Frederick Soddy | Scientific career
While at Repton he was awarded a doctorate from the University of London for a thesis in radioactive decay (the measurement of the half-period of Radium C).
Arthur W. Barton | Introduction
Ernest Rutherford was Langsworthy Professor of Physics at the Victoria University of Manchester (now the University of Manchester). He had already received numerous honours for his studies of radiation. He had discovered the existence of alpha rays, beta rays, and gamma rays, and had proved that these were the consequence of the disintegration of atoms. In 1906, he received a visit from a German physicist named Hans Geiger, and was so impressed that he asked Geiger to stay and help him with his research. Ernest Marsden was a physics undergraduate student studying under Geiger. Alpha particles are tiny, positively charged particles that are spontaneously emitted by certain substances such as uranium and radium.
Geiger–Marsden experiment | Background
He finished his doctoral thesis in 1913, and by 1914 he was considered by Rutherford as a leading researcher into beta decay, but he did no further work. He enlisted in the French army in 1914 and was killed in action near Cormicy.
Jan Kazimierz Danysz | Introduction
Frederick Soddy FRS (2 September 1877 – 22 September 1956) was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements.
Frederick Soddy | Introduction
In 1906 at the University of Manchester, Rutherford oversaw an experiment conducted by his students Hans Geiger (known for the Geiger counter) and Ernest Marsden. In the Geiger–Marsden experiment, a beam of alpha particles, generated by the radioactive decay of radon, was directed normally onto a sheet of very thin gold foil in an evacuated chamber. Under the prevailing plum pudding model, the alpha particles should all have passed through the foil and hit the detector screen, or have been deflected by, at most, a few degrees. However, the actual results surprised Rutherford. Although many of the alpha particles did pass through as expected, many others were deflected at small angles while others were reflected back to the alpha source.
History of chemistry | Ernest Rutherford
It became clear from these experiments that there was a form of invisible radiation that could pass through paper and was causing the plate to react as if exposed to light. At first, it seemed as though the new radiation was similar to the then recently discovered X-rays. Further research by Becquerel, Ernest Rutherford, Paul Villard, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and others showed that this form of radioactivity was significantly more complicated. Rutherford was the first to realize that all such elements decay in accordance with the same mathematical exponential formula. Rutherford and his student Frederick Soddy were the first to realize that many decay processes resulted in the transmutation of one element to another.
Radioactive decay | History of discovery
Concurrent with the work of Rutherford, Geiger, and Marsden, the radiochemist Frederick Soddy at the University of Glasgow was studying chemistry related problems on radioactive materials. Soddy had worked with Rutherford on radioactivity at McGill University. By 1910, about 40 different radioactive elements, referred to as "radioelements", had been identified between uranium and lead, although the periodic table only allowed for 11 elements. Soddy and Kazimierz Fajans independently found in 1913 that an element undergoing alpha decay will produce an element two places to the left in the periodic system and an element undergoing beta decay will produce an element one place to the right in the periodic system.
Discovery of the neutron | Discovery of isotopes
The rutherford (symbol Rd) is a non-SI unit of radioactive decay. It is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one million nuclei decay per second. It is therefore equivalent to one megabecquerel, and one becquerel equals one microrutherford. One rutherford is equivalent to 2.703 × 10 curie. The unit was introduced in 1946. It was named after British/New Zealand physicist and Nobel laureate Lord Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Prize in 1908), who was an early leader in the study of atomic nucleus disintegrations. After the becquerel was introduced in 1975 as the SI unit for activity, the rutherford became obsolete, and it is no longer commonly used.
Rutherford (unit) | Introduction
Bertram Borden Boltwood (July 27, 1870 Amherst, Massachusetts – August 15, 1927, Hancock Point, Maine) was an American pioneer of radiochemistry. He graduated from Yale University, and taught there 1897-1900. He established that lead was the final decay product of uranium, noted that the lead-uranium ratio was greater in older rocks and, acting on a suggestion by Ernest Rutherford, was the first to measure the age of rocks by the decay of uranium to lead, in 1907. He got results of ages of 400 to 2200 million years, the first successful use of radioactive decay by Pb/U chemical dating (isotopes not discovered yet).
Bertram Boltwood | Introduction
The only alternative to neutrons was the existence of "nuclear electrons" which would counteract some of the proton charges in the nucleus, since by then it was known that nuclei had about twice the mass that could be accounted for if they were simply assembled from hydrogen nuclei (protons). But how these nuclear electrons could be trapped in the nucleus, was a mystery.
Ernest Rutherford | Gold foil experiment
Rutherford returned to Cambridge in 1918, and spent the last 19 years of his life there. This was around the time of the change from classical to modern physics, and Rutherford was something of a contradiction, dressing as a Victorian gentleman but working on the cutting edge of physics. Rutherford died suddenly in 1937, marking the end of an era for the Cavendish.
Cavendish Professor of Physics | Ernest Rutherford
His 1932 doctoral thesis, written under the supervision of Rutherford and Charles Drummond Ellis, on "The Disintegration Electrons", subsequently published in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society", described relationship between the radioactive disintegration constants of beta particle-emitting radioisotopes and corresponding logarithms of their maximum beta particle energies. These plots are today known as "Sargent curves" or "Sargent diagrams". This was used by Enrico Fermi in developing his theory of beta decay. Sargent returned to Canada, where he became a lecturer and then an assistant professor at Queen's University. In 1941, he joined George Laurence of the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa to investigate nuclear energy, writing a report on "Uranium Fission in a Bulk of Carbon and Uranium Oxide".
Bernice Weldon Sargent | Biography
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand–born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. "Encyclopædia Britannica" considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867). In early work, Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, the radioactive element radon, and differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. This work was performed at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, 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, and the chemistry of radioactive substances", for which he was the first Canadian and Oceanian Nobel laureate.
Ernest Rutherford | Introduction
Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei. Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering by the gold foil experiment of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden. He performed the first artificially induced nuclear reaction in 1917 in experiments where nitrogen nuclei were bombarded with alpha particles.
Ernest Rutherford | Introduction
New Zealand-born chemist and physicist Ernest Rutherford is considered to be "the father of nuclear physics." Rutherford is best known for devising the names alpha, beta, and gamma to classify various forms of radioactive "rays" which were poorly understood at his time (alpha and beta rays are particle beams, while gamma rays are a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation). Rutherford deflected alpha rays with both electric and magnetic fields in 1903. Working with Frederick Soddy, Rutherford explained that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also observed that the intensity of radioactivity of a radioactive element decreases over a unique and regular amount of time until a point of stability, and he named the halving time the "half-life." In 1901 and 1902 he worked with Frederick Soddy to prove that atoms of one radioactive element would spontaneously turn into another, by expelling a piece of the atom at high velocity.
History of chemistry | Ernest Rutherford
Whilst at the Palmer Physical Laboratory at Princeton University from 1926–28, he discovered alpha decay via quantum tunnelling, together with Edward Condon and independently of George Gamow. In the early 1900s, radioactive materials were known to have characteristic exponential decay rates or half lives. At the same time, radiation emissions were known to have certain characteristic energies. By 1928, Gamow had solved the theory of the alpha decay of a nucleus via quantum tunnelling and the problem was also solved independently by Gurney and Condon. Gurney and Condon did not, however, produce the quantitative results achieved by Gamow in his work.
Ronald Wilfred Gurney | Radioactive decay processes
At the beginning of the 20th century it was widely believed that atoms never change: an atom of one element stayed that way forever. Rutherford had already revealed the structure of an atom to consist mostly of empty space with a dense nucleus of protons at the centre, and Henry Mosley had shown that it is the number of protons that gives an atom its identity as a particular element. An atom of the element carbon has 6 protons, whilst an atom with 7 protons is one of nitrogen. Rutherford came to the conclusion that the number of protons in a radioactive element "could" change – through a process of decay where parts of the nucleus are ejected from the atom.
Chemistry: A Volatile History | Ernest Rutherford explains radioactivity
It later came to be known as radon. Rutherford identified beta rays as cathode rays (electrons), and hypothesised—and in 1909 with Thomas Royds proved—that alpha particles were helium nuclei. Observing the radioactive disintegration of elements, Rutherford and Soddy classified the radioactive products according to their characteristic rates of decay, introducing the concept of a half-life. In 1903, Soddy and Margaret Todd applied the term "isotope" to atoms that were chemically and spectroscopically indistinct but had different radioactive half-lives. Rutherford proposed a model of the atom in which a very small, dense and positively charged nucleus of protons was surrounded by orbiting, negatively charged electrons (the Rutherford model).
Discovery of nuclear fission | Radioactivity
Rutherford applied the principle of a radioactive element's half-life to studies of age determination of rocks by measuring the decay period of radium to lead-206. Half-life is constant over the lifetime of an exponentially decaying quantity, and it is a characteristic unit for the exponential decay equation. The accompanying table shows the reduction of a quantity as a function of the number of half-lives elapsed.
Half-life | Introduction
It was realized that such devices could be used in the detection and counting of Alpha particles in the nuclear disintegration experiments then being undertaken by Rutherford, who encouraged him to devote his attention to the construction of a reliable valve amplifier and methods of registering and counting particles.
C. E. Wynn-Williams | Prewar research
Thus, confirming and extending the work of Wilhelm Wien who in 1898 discovered the proton in streams of ionized gas, Rutherford postulated the hydrogen nucleus to be a new particle in 1920, which he dubbed the "proton". In 1921, while working with Niels Bohr (who postulated that electrons moved in specific orbits), Rutherford theorized about the existence of neutrons, (which he had christened in his 1920 Bakerian Lecture), which could somehow compensate for the repelling effect of the positive charges of protons by causing an attractive nuclear force and thus keep the nuclei from flying apart from the repulsion between protons.
Ernest Rutherford | Gold foil experiment
Subsequently, the radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy was formulated to describe the products of alpha and beta decay.
Radioactive decay | History of discovery
Frances Pleasonton (1912–1990) was a Particle Physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She was an active teacher and researcher, and a member of the team who first demonstrated neutron decay in 1951.
Frances Pleasonton | Introduction
Rutherford's speech in part, read:
Ernest Rutherford | Nuclear physics
Radioactivity, which had overthrown the old calculations, yielded a bonus by providing a basis for new calculations, in the form of radiometric dating. Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy jointly had continued their work on radioactive materials and concluded that radioactivity was due to a spontaneous transmutation of atomic elements. In radioactive decay, an element breaks down into another, lighter element, releasing alpha, beta, or gamma radiation in the process. They also determined that a particular isotope of a radioactive element decays into another element at a distinctive rate. This rate is given in terms of a "half-life", or the amount of time it takes half of a mass of that radioactive material to break down into its "decay product".
Age of Earth | Invention of radiometric dating
They also worked with samples of "Uranium X" from William Crookes and radium from Marie Curie. In 1903, they published their "Law of Radioactive Change", to account for all their experiments. Until then, atoms were assumed to be the indestructible basis of all matter and although Curie had suggested that radioactivity was an atomic phenomenon, the idea of the atoms of radioactive substances breaking up was a radically new idea. Rutherford and Soddy demonstrated that radioactivity involved the spontaneous disintegration of atoms into other, as yet, unidentified matter. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1908 was awarded to Ernest Rutherford "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".
Ernest Rutherford | Scientific research
Artificial disintegration is the term coined by Ernest Rutherford for the process by which an atomic nucleus is broken down by bombarding it with high speed alpha particles, either from a particle accelerator, or a naturally decaying radioactive substance such as radium, as Rutherford originally used.
Artificial disintegration | Introduction
This element is now named radon, the only one of the rare radioelements to be discovered in nature as a daughter of thorium rather than uranium. After accounting for the contribution of radon, Rutherford, now working with the British physicist Frederick Soddy, showed how thorium decayed at a fixed rate over time into a series of other elements in work dating from 1900 to 1903. This observation led to the identification of the half-life as one of the outcomes of the alpha particle experiments that led to the disintegration theory of radioactivity. The biological effect of radiation was discovered in 1903.
Thorium | Radioactivity
Ernest Rutherford accepted Cockcroft as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory, and Cockcroft completed his doctorate under Rutherford's supervision in 1928. With Ernest Walton and Mark Oliphant he built what became known as a Cockcroft–Walton accelerator. Cockcroft and Walton used this to perform the first artificial disintegration of an atomic nucleus, a feat popularly known as "splitting the atom". During the Second World War Cockcroft became Assistant Director of Scientific Research in the Ministry of Supply, working on radar. He was also a member of the committee formed to handle issues arising from the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which calculated that an atomic bomb could be technically feasible, and of the MAUD Committee which succeeded it.
John Cockcroft | Introduction
If the latter is produced and decays with a short half-life, the two possibilities cannot be distinguished. Given that the electron capture of Db cannot be detected, these spontaneous fission events may be due to Rf, in which case the half-life of this isotope cannot be extracted. A similar mechanism is proposed for the formation of the even heavier isotope Rf as a short-lived daughter of Db (in the decay chain of Ts, first synthesized in 2010) which then undergoes spontaneous fission:
Isotopes of rutherfordium | Decay studies
In 1919–1920, Rutherford found that nitrogen and other light elements ejected a proton, which he called a "hydrogen atom", when hit with α (alpha) particles. This result showed Rutherford that hydrogen nuclei were a part of nitrogen nuclei (and by inference, probably other nuclei as well). Such a construction had been suspected for many years on the basis of atomic weights which were whole numbers of that of hydrogen; see Prout's hypothesis. Hydrogen was known to be the lightest element, and its nuclei presumably the lightest nuclei. Now, because of all these considerations, Rutherford decided that a hydrogen nucleus was possibly a fundamental building block of all nuclei, and also possibly a new fundamental particle as well, since nothing was known from the nucleus that was lighter.
Ernest Rutherford | Gold foil experiment
It was first consciously applied to modern physics by Frederick Soddy when he, along with Ernest Rutherford, discovered that radioactive thorium was converting itself into radium in 1901. At the moment of realization, Soddy later recalled, he shouted out: "Rutherford, this is transmutation!" Rutherford snapped back, "For Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it "transmutation". They'll have our heads off as alchemists." Rutherford and Soddy were observing natural transmutation as a part of radioactive decay of the alpha decay type. The first artificial transmutation was accomplished in 1925 by Patrick Blackett, a research fellow working under Rutherford, with the transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen, using alpha particles directed at nitrogen N + α → O + p.
Nuclear transmutation | Modern physics
The Lord Rutherford title is also now extinct. From 1839 to 1851 Andrew Rutherford was MP for Leith. He had also held the office of Lord Advocate and had been elevated to the Bench with the judicial title of Lord Rutherford. Ernest Rutherford discovered the alpha particle and also developed the nuclear theory of atomic structure. He laid the groundwork for nuclear physics in the twentieth century. In 1914, he was knighted and in 1925 he was appointed to the Order of Merit. S.P.Rutherford. is a Brazilian/Australian young lady direct descendant of Humphrey Gilbert and part of the Rossini family in Turin, said to have occupied the heart of Piedmont.
Clan Rutherford | Modern history
Bernice Weldon Sargent, (24 September 1906 – 17 December 1993) was a Canadian physicist who worked at the Manhattan Project's Montreal Laboratory during the Second World War as head of its nuclear physics division. In his 1932 doctoral thesis, he discovered the relationship between the radioactive disintegration constants of beta particle-emitting radioisotopes and corresponding logarithms of their maximum beta particle energies. These plots are known as "Sargent curves".
Bernice Weldon Sargent | Introduction
His external examiner was Ralph Fowler from the University of Cambridge, who was Paul Dirac's PhD supervisor. In 1929, with the benefit of an Aitchison travelling scholarship from the University of Melbourne, Massey went to Trinity College, Cambridge to perform research at the Cavendish Laboratory led by Ernest Rutherford. The scholarship expired after two years, but he was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1931. At this time the Cavendish Laboratory was one of the leading centres of physics in the world. In 1932 Cavendish laboratory scientists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split the atomic nucleus, James Chadwick discovered the neutron, and Patrick Blackett and Giuseppe Occhialini confirmed the existence of the positron.
Harrie Massey | Career
Rutherford's research, and work done under him as laboratory director, established the nuclear structure of the atom and the essential nature of radioactive decay as a nuclear process. Patrick Blackett, a research fellow working under Rutherford, using natural alpha particles, demonstrated "induced" nuclear transmutation. Rutherford's team later, using protons from an accelerator, demonstrated "artificially-induced" nuclear reactions and transmutation. He is known as the father of nuclear physics. Rutherford died too early to see Leó Szilárd's idea of controlled nuclear chain reactions come into being. However, a speech of Rutherford's about his artificially-induced transmutation in lithium, printed in 12 September 1933 London paper "The Times", was reported by Szilárd to have been his inspiration for thinking of the possibility of a controlled energy-producing nuclear chain reaction.
Ernest Rutherford | Nuclear physics
Szilard had this idea while walking in London, on the same day. Rutherford's speech touched on the 1932 work of his students John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in "splitting" lithium into alpha particles by bombardment with protons from a particle accelerator they had constructed. Rutherford realized that the energy released from the split lithium atoms was enormous, but he also realized that the energy needed for the accelerator, and its essential inefficiency in splitting atoms in this fashion, made the project an impossibility as a practical source of energy (accelerator-induced fission of light elements remains too inefficient to be used in this way, even today).
Ernest Rutherford | Nuclear physics
Several important early physics discoveries were made here, including the discovery of the electron by J.J. Thomson (1897) the Townsend discharge by John Sealy Townsend, and the development of the cloud chamber by C.T.R. Wilson. Ernest Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory 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 was performed by students working under his direction; John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton.
Cavendish Laboratory | Physics
American chemist Bertram Boltwood proposed several decay chains linking these radioelements between uranium and lead. These were thought at the time to be new chemical elements, substantially increasing the number of known "elements" and leading to speculations that their discoveries would undermine the concept of the periodic table. For example, there was not enough room between lead and uranium to accommodate these discoveries, even assuming that some discoveries were duplicates or incorrect identifications. It was also believed that radioactive decay violated one of the central principles of the periodic table, namely that chemical elements could not undergo transmutations and always had unique identities.
History of the periodic table | Radioactivity, isotopes, and the Rutherford model
These calculations were not particularly trustworthy. For example, he assumed that the samples had contained only uranium and no lead when they were formed. More important research was published in 1913. It showed that elements generally exist in multiple variants with different masses, or "isotopes". In the 1930s, isotopes would be shown to have nuclei with differing numbers of the neutral particles known as "neutrons". In that same year, other research was published establishing the rules for radioactive decay, allowing more precise identification of decay series.
Age of Earth | Arthur Holmes establishes radiometric dating
For some time before his death, Rutherford had a small hernia, which he had neglected to have fixed, and it became strangulated, causing him to be violently ill. Despite an emergency operation in London, he died four days afterwards of what physicians termed "intestinal paralysis", at Cambridge. After cremation at Golders Green Crematorium, he was given the high honour of burial in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton and other illustrious British scientists.
Ernest Rutherford | Later years and honours
The Rutherford model was devised by the New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford to describe an atom. Rutherford directed the Geiger–Marsden experiment in 1909, which suggested, upon Rutherford's 1911 analysis, that J. J. Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom was incorrect. Rutherford's new model for the atom, based on the experimental results, contained new features of a relatively high central charge concentrated into a very small volume in comparison to the rest of the atom and with this central volume also containing the bulk of the atomic mass of the atom. This region would be known as the "nucleus" of the atom.
Rutherford model | Introduction
Although Boltwood published his paper in a prominent geological journal, the geological community had little interest in radioactivity. Boltwood gave up work on radiometric dating and went on to investigate other decay series. Rutherford remained mildly curious about the issue of the age of Earth but did little work on it. Robert Strutt tinkered with Rutherford's helium method until 1910 and then ceased. However, Strutt's student Arthur Holmes became interested in radiometric dating and continued to work on it after everyone else had given up. Holmes focused on lead dating, because he regarded the helium method as unpromising. He performed measurements on rock samples and concluded in 1911 that the oldest (a sample from Ceylon) was about 1.6 billion years old.
Age of Earth | Arthur Holmes establishes radiometric dating
Radioactivity Radionuclides Radiation by Joseph Magill and Jean Galy, Springer Verlag, 2005
Decay energy | References
Rutherford later described this as "almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back to hit you". The apparatus used in the experiment was an early version of what was to become the Geiger counter.
Ernest Marsden | Education
Radioactivity was discovered in 1896 by Henri Becquerel in uranium, and subsequently observed by Marie and Pierre Curie in thorium and in the new elements polonium and radium. In 1899, Ernest Rutherford separated radioactive emissions into two types: alpha and beta (now beta minus), based on penetration of objects and ability to cause ionization. Alpha rays could be stopped by thin sheets of paper or aluminium, whereas beta rays could penetrate several millimetres of aluminium. In 1900, Paul Villard identified a still more penetrating type of radiation, which Rutherford identified as a fundamentally new type in 1903 and termed gamma rays.
Beta decay | Discovery and initial characterization
Reports on the decay chain of flerovium-285 in 2010 showed five sequential alpha decays that terminate in Rf, which further undergoes spontaneous fission with a half-life of 152 seconds. Some experimental evidence was obtained in 2004 for an even heavier isotope, Rf, in the decay chain of an isotope of moscovium: However, the last step in this chain was uncertain. After observing the five alpha decay events that generate dubnium-268, spontaneous fission events were observed with a long half-life. It is unclear whether these events were due to direct spontaneous fission of Db, or Db produced electron capture events with long half-lives to generate Rf.
Isotopes of rutherfordium | Decay studies
Ernest Charles "Ernie" Pollard (April 16, 1906 – February 24, 1997) was a British professor of physics and biophysics and an author, who worked on the development of radar systems in World War II, worked on the physics of living cells, and wrote textbooks and approximately 200 papers on nuclear physics and radiation biophysics.
Ernest C. Pollard | Introduction
The nucleus was discovered in 1911, as a result of Ernest Rutherford's efforts to test Thomson's "plum pudding model" of the atom. The electron had already been discovered by J.J. Thomson himself. Knowing that atoms are electrically neutral, J.J.Thomson postulated that there must be a positive charge as well. In his plum pudding model, Thomson suggested that an atom consisted of negative electrons randomly scattered within a sphere of positive charge. Ernest Rutherford later devised an experiment with his research partner Hans Geiger and with help of Ernest Marsden, that involved the deflection of alpha particles (helium nuclei) directed at a thin sheet of metal foil.
Atomic nucleus | History
Rutherford backscattering spectrometry is named after Lord Rutherford, a physicist sometimes referred to as the father of nuclear physics. Rutherford supervised a series of experiments carried out by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden between 1909 and 1914 studying the scattering of alpha particles through metal foils. While attempting to eliminate "stray particles" they believed to be caused by an imperfection in their alpha source, Rutherford suggested that Marsden attempt to measure backscattering from a gold foil sample. According to the then-dominant plum-pudding model of the atom, in which small negative electrons were spread through a diffuse positive region, backscattering of the high-energy positive alpha particles should have been nonexistent.
Rutherford backscattering spectrometry | The Geiger–Marsden experiment
Rutherford remarked that: "Hahn has a special nose for discovering new elements."
Otto Hahn | Discovery of radio thorium, and other "new elements"
Alpha, beta, and gamma are the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. In 1900, Becquerel measured the mass-to-charge ratio () for beta particles by the method of J.J. Thomson used to study cathode rays and identify the electron. He found that for a beta particle is the same as for Thomson's electron, and therefore suggested that the beta particle is in fact an electron. In 1901, Rutherford and Frederick Soddy showed that alpha and beta radioactivity involves the transmutation of atoms into atoms of other chemical elements. In 1913, after the products of more radioactive decays were known, Soddy and Kazimierz Fajans independently proposed their radioactive displacement law, which states that beta (i.e., ) emission from one element produces another element one place to the right in the periodic table, while alpha emission produces an element two places to the left.
Beta decay | Discovery and initial characterization
Prout's hypothesis was an influence on Ernest Rutherford when he succeeded in "knocking" hydrogen nuclei out of nitrogen atoms with alpha particles in 1917, and thus concluded that perhaps the nuclei of all elements were made of such particles (the hydrogen nucleus), which in 1920 he suggested be named protons, from the suffix for particles, added to the stem of Prout's word "protyle". The assumption as discussed by Rutherford was of a nucleus consisting of Z+N=A protons plus N electrons somehow trapped within thereby reducing the positive charge to +Z as observed and vaguely explaining beta decay radioactivity. Such a nuclear constitution was known to be inconsistent with dynamics either classical or early quantum but seemed inevitable until the neutron hypothesis by Rutherford and discovery by Chadwick.
Prout's hypothesis | Introduction
Rutherford is considered to have been among the greatest scientists in history. At the opening session of the 1938 Indian Science Congress, which Rutherford had been expected to preside over before his death, astrophysicist James Jeans spoke in his place and deemed him "one of the greatest scientists of all time", saying:
Ernest Rutherford | Legacy
Sir Ernest Marsden (19 February 1889 – 15 December 1970) was an English-New Zealand physicist. He is recognised internationally for his contributions to science while working under Ernest Rutherford, which led to the discovery of new theories on the structure of the atom. In Marsden's later work in New Zealand, he became a significant member of the scientific community, while maintaining close links to the United Kingdom.
Ernest Marsden | Introduction
Most isotopes with an atomic mass below 262 have also observed as decay products of elements with a higher atomic number, allowing for refinement of their previously measured properties. Heavier isotopes of rutherfordium have only been observed as decay products. For example, a few alpha decay events terminating in Rf were observed in the decay chain of darmstadtium-279 since 2004: This further underwent spontaneous fission with a half-life of about 1.3 h. Investigations on the synthesis of the dubnium-263 isotope in 1999 at the University of Bern revealed events consistent with electron capture to form Rf. A rutherfordium fraction was separated, and several spontaneous fission events with long half-lives of about 15 minutes were observed, as well as alpha decays with half-lives of about 10 minutes.
Isotopes of rutherfordium | Decay studies
Cockcroft helped with the design and construction of helium liquefiers. In 1919, Rutherford had succeeded in disintegrating nitrogen atoms with alpha particles emitted from decaying radium atoms. This and subsequent experiments hinted at the structure of atomic nuclei. To explore it further, he needed an artificial means of creating particles with a velocity high enough to overcome the charge of the nucleus. This opened a new line of research at the Cavendish Laboratory. He assigned Cockcroft, Thomas Allibone and Ernest Walton to the problem. They built what became known as a Cockcroft–Walton accelerator. Mark Oliphant designed a proton source for them.
John Cockcroft | Nuclear research
In 1934, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England he and James Chadwick, through what they called the nuclear photo-electric effect, established that the neutron has a great enough mass over the proton to decay. He moved to the University of Illinois in 1938. In the 1940s with his wife Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber he established that beta particles are identical to electrons. He joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1950. With Edward Teller he proposed that the so-called "giant-dipole nuclear resonance" was due to the neutrons in a nucleus vibrating as a group against the protons as a group (Goldhaber-Teller model).
Maurice Goldhaber | Career
At Cambridge, Rutherford started to work with J. J. Thomson on the conductive effects of X-rays on gases, work which led to the discovery of the electron which Thomson presented to the world in 1897. Hearing of Becquerel's experience with uranium, Rutherford started to explore its radioactivity, discovering two types that differed from X-rays in their penetrating power. Continuing his research in Canada, he coined the terms alpha ray and beta ray in 1899 to describe the two distinct types of radiation. He then discovered that thorium gave off a gas which produced an emanation which was itself radioactive and would coat other substances.
Ernest Rutherford | Scientific research
Rutherford was knighted in 1914. During World War I, he worked on a top secret project to solve the practical problems of submarine detection by sonar. In 1916, he was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal. In 1919, he returned to the Cavendish succeeding J. J. Thomson as the Cavendish professor and Director. Under him, Nobel Prizes were awarded to James Chadwick for discovering the neutron (in 1932), John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton for an experiment which was to be known as "splitting the atom" using a particle accelerator, and Edward Appleton for demonstrating the existence of the ionosphere. In 1925, Rutherford pushed calls to the New Zealand Government to support education and research, which led to the formation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in the following year.
Ernest Rutherford | Later years and honours
In 1913, chemists Frederick Soddy and Kasimir Fajans independently observed that alpha decay caused atoms to shift down two places on the periodic table, while the loss of two beta particles restored it to its original position. Under the resulting reorganisation of the periodic table, radium was placed in group II, actinium in group III, thorium in group IV and uranium in group VI. This left a gap between thorium and uranium. Soddy predicted that this unknown element, which he referred to (after Dmitri Mendeleev) as "ekatantalium", would be an alpha emitter with chemical properties similar to tantalium. It was not long before Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring discovered it as a decay product of a beta-emitting product of thorium.
Otto Hahn | Discovery of protactinium
In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactive decay in a variety of chemical elements. Subsequently, the beta radiation from these decays was discovered to be the emission of a negatively charged particle. Later these particles were identified with the electron, discovered in cathode ray experiments by J. J. Thomson in 1897. This was connected with the theoretical prediction of the electromagnetic mass by J. J. Thomson in 1881, who showed that the electromagnetic energy contributes to the mass of a moving charged body. Thomson (1893) and George Frederick Charles Searle (1897) also calculated that this mass depends on velocity, and that it becomes infinitely great when the body moves at the speed of light with respect to the luminiferous aether.
Kaufmann–Bucherer–Neumann experiments | Historical context
While experimenting with the products of radioactive decay, in 1913 radiochemist Frederick Soddy discovered that there appeared to be more than one type of atom at each position on the periodic table. The term isotope was coined by Margaret Todd as a suitable name for different atoms that belong to the same element. J. J. Thomson created a technique for isotope separation through his work on ionized gases, which subsequently led to the discovery of stable isotopes.
Atom | Discovery of isotopes
From his results, Rutherford developed a model of the atom that was similar to the solar system, known as the Rutherford model. Like planets, electrons orbited a central, sun-like nucleus. For his work with radiation and the atomic nucleus, Rutherford received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
History of chemistry | Ernest Rutherford
It was not long before Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring discovered it as a decay product of a beta-emitting product of thorium. Based on the radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy, this was an isotope of the missing element, which they named "brevium" after its short half-life. However, it was a beta emitter, and therefore could not be the mother isotope of actinium. This had to be another isotope. Two scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) in Berlin-Dahlem took up the challenge of finding the missing isotope. Otto Hahn had graduated from the University of Marburg as an organic chemist, but had been a post-doctoral researcher at University College London under Sir William Ramsay, and under Rutherford at McGill University, where he had studied radioactive isotopes.
Discovery of nuclear fission | Protactinium
Ernest Rutherford accepted Cockcroft as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory on the recommendation of Miles Walker and the director of research at Metropolitan Vickers. Cockcroft enrolled as a PhD student in 1924, with a Foundation Scholarship of St John's College, and a State Scholarship. Under Rutherford's supervision, he wrote his doctoral thesis "On phenomena occurring in the condensation of molecular streams on surfaces", which was published in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society". He was awarded his doctorate on 6 September 1925. During this time he was an assistant to the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza, who was working on the physics of magnetic fields in extremely low temperatures.
John Cockcroft | Nuclear research
J. J. Thomson thought that the negatively-charged electrons were distributed throughout the atom in a sea of positive charge that was distributed across the whole volume of the atom. This model is sometimes known as the plum pudding model. Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden came to have doubts about the Thomson model after they encountered difficulties when they tried to build an instrument to measure the charge-to-mass ratio of alpha particles (these are positively-charged particles emitted by certain radioactive substances such as radium). The alpha particles were being scattered by the air in the detection chamber, which made the measurements unreliable.
Atom | Discovery of the nucleus
Alfred William Rutherford FRS is Professor and Chair in Biochemistry of Solar energy in the Department of Life sciences at Imperial College London.
Bill Rutherford | Introduction
The Rutherford formula (see below) further neglects the recoil kinetic energy of the massive target nucleus. The initial discovery was made by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909 when they performed the gold foil experiment in collaboration with Rutherford, in which they fired a beam of alpha particles (helium nuclei) at foils of gold leaf only a few atoms thick. At the time of the experiment, the atom was thought to be analogous to a plum pudding (as proposed by J. J. Thomson), with the negatively-charged electrons (the plums) studded throughout a positive spherical matrix (the pudding). If the plum-pudding model were correct, the positive "pudding", being more spread out than in the correct model of a concentrated nucleus, would not be able to exert such large coulombic forces, and the alpha particles should only be deflected by small angles as they pass through.
Rutherford scattering | Introduction
The medal is named after Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate, who pioneered the orbital theory of the atom.
Rutherford Medal (Royal Society of New Zealand) | Introduction
With Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman developed a model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial currents (an example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an antineutrino). Although E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal because the weak interaction was neatly described by the vector and axial currents. It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity violation. Feynman attempted an explanation, called the parton model, of the strong interactions governing nucleon scattering.
Richard Feynman | Physics
Soddy recognized that emission of an alpha particle followed by two beta particles led to the formation of an element chemically identical to the initial element but with a mass four units lighter and with different radioactive properties. Soddy proposed that several types of atoms (differing in radioactive properties) could occupy the same place in the table. For example, the alpha-decay of uranium-235 forms thorium-231, whereas the beta decay of actinium-230 forms thorium-230. The term "isotope", Greek for "at the same place", was suggested to Soddy by Margaret Todd, a Scottish physician and family friend, during a conversation in which he explained his ideas to her.
Isotope | Radioactive isotopes
References to the word "neutron" in connection with the atom can be found in the literature as early as 1899, however.
Discovery of the neutron | Rutherford atom
In her post-war research, Wu continued to investigate beta decay. Enrico Fermi had published his theory of beta decay in 1934, but an experiment by Luis Walter Alvarez had produced results at variance with the theory. Wu set out to repeat the experiment and verify the result. She suspected that the problem was that a thick and uneven film of copper(II) sulfate () was being used as a copper-64 beta ray source, which was causing the emitted electrons to lose energy. To get around this, she adapted an older form of spectrometer, a solenoidal spectrometer. She added detergent to the copper sulphate to produce a thin and even film.
Chien-Shiung Wu | Beta decay and the conservation of parity
Later studies at GSI on the synthesis of copernicium and hassium isotopes produced conflicting data, as Rf produced in the decay chain was found to undergo 8.52 MeV alpha decay with a half-life of 4 seconds. Later results indicated a predominant fission branch. These contradictions led to some doubt on the discovery of copernicium. The first isomer is currently denoted Rf (or simply Rf) whilst the second is denoted Rf (or Rf). However, it is thought that the first nucleus belongs to a high-spin ground state and the latter to a low-spin metastable state. The discovery and confirmation of Rf provided proof for the discovery of copernicium in 1996.
Isotopes of rutherfordium | Nuclear isomerism
Walton was awarded his PhD in 1931 and remained at Cambridge as a researcher until 1934. During the early 1930s Walton and John Cockcroft collaborated to build an apparatus that split the nuclei of lithium atoms by bombarding them with a stream of protons accelerated inside a high-voltage tube (700 kilovolts). The splitting of the lithium nuclei produced helium nuclei. This was experimental verification of theories about atomic structure that had been proposed earlier by Rutherford, George Gamow, and others. The successful apparatus – a type of particle accelerator now called the Cockcroft-Walton generator – helped to usher in an era of particle-accelerator-based experimental nuclear physics.
Ernest Walton | Early years
Thomson's plum pudding model was disproved in 1909 by one of his former students, Ernest Rutherford, who discovered that most of the mass and positive charge of an atom is concentrated in a very small fraction of its volume, which he assumed to be at the very center. Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden came to have doubts about the Thomson model after they encountered difficulties when they tried to build an instrument to measure the charge-to-mass ratio of alpha particles (these are positively-charged particles emitted by certain radioactive substances such as radium). The alpha particles were being scattered by the air in the detection chamber, which made the measurements unreliable.
Atomic theory | Discovery of the nucleus
Ernest George Merritt (April 28, 1865 – June 5, 1948) was Dean of the Graduate School, Cornell University; Chair of the Physics Department.
Ernest Merritt | Introduction
Henri Becquerel, while experimenting with fluorescence, accidentally found out that uranium exposed a photographic plate, wrapped with black paper, with some unknown radiation that could not be turned off like X-rays. Ernest Rutherford continued these experiments and discovered two different kinds of radiation: He published his results in 1899.
Beta particle | History
Soddy and Kasimir Fajans independently observed in 1913 that alpha decay caused atoms to shift down two places in the periodic table, while the loss of two beta particles restored it to its original position. In the resulting reorganisation of the periodic table, radium was placed in group II, actinium in group III, thorium in group IV and uranium in group VI. This left a gap between thorium and uranium. Soddy predicted that this unknown element, which he referred to (after Dmitri Mendeleev) as "ekatantalium", would be an alpha emitter with chemical properties similar to tantalium (now known as tantalum).
Discovery of nuclear fission | Protactinium
Friedrich Ernst Dorn (27 July 1848 – 16 December 1916) was a German physicist who was the first to discover that a radioactive substance, later named radon, is emitted from radium.
Friedrich Ernst Dorn | Introduction
After leaving the experiment running for a long period of time, a spectral analysis of the contents of the former evacuated space revealed the presence of helium. Later in 1907, Rutherford and Thomas Royds showed that the helium was first formed as positively charged nuclei of helium (He) which were identical to alpha particles, which could pass through the thin glass wall but were contained within the surrounding glass envelope. From 1904 to 1914, Soddy was a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Ruth Pirret worked as his research assistant during this time. In May 1910 Soddy was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Frederick Soddy | Scientific career
Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton (6 October 1903 – 25 June 1995) was an Anglo-Irish physicist and Nobel laureate for his work with John Cockcroft with "atom-smashing" experiments done at Cambridge University in the early 1930s, and so became the first person in history to split the atom.
Ernest Walton | Introduction
Sherr became an assistant professor of physics at Princeton University in 1946, an associate professor in 1949, and a full professor in 1955. In 1953, he provided experimental evidence of Fermi's interaction, a theoretical explanation for the beta decay phenomenon. Between 1955 and 1971, he headed an Atomic Energy Commission-contracted nuclear research project, and oversaw the development of Princeton's AVF cyclotron in 1970. Sherr retired from Princeton in 1982, but remained active in the research community for the rest of his life. He published over 100 articles in scientific journals during his career.
Rubby Sherr | Academic career
De Pretto's paper discussed the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium and was the first to conclude that this decay was energy transformation from mass into energy. He also presented a hypothesis that the intense heat assumed to be in the center of the Earth (theory of central fire) was caused by the tremendous mass of the earth creating a massive radioactive core giving off heat and energy.
Olinto De Pretto | Radioactive decay
While experimenting with the products of radioactive decay, in 1913 radiochemist Frederick Soddy discovered that there appeared to be more than one element at each position on the periodic table. The term isotope was coined by Margaret Todd as a suitable name for these elements. That same year, J. J. Thomson conducted an experiment in which he channeled a stream of neon ions through magnetic and electric fields, striking a photographic plate at the other end. He observed two glowing patches on the plate, which suggested two different deflection trajectories. Thomson concluded this was because some of the neon ions had a different mass.
Atomic theory | Discovery of isotopes
Robert Curtis Retherford (1912 – 1981) was an American physicist. He was a graduate student of Willis Lamb at Columbia Radiation Laboratory. Retherford and Lamb performed the famous experiment revealing Lamb shift in the fine structure of hydrogen, a decisive experimental step toward a new understanding of quantum electrodynamics.
Robert Retherford | Introduction
Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England. James had emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland, "to raise a little flax and a lot of children". Ernest was born at Brightwater, near Nelson, New Zealand. His first name was mistakenly spelled 'Earnest' when his birth was registered. Rutherford's mother Martha Thompson was a schoolteacher. He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand, where he participated in the debating society and played rugby. After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of research during which he invented a new form of radio receiver, in 1895 Rutherford was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, to travel to England for postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.
Ernest Rutherford | Early life and education
After experimentation Rutherford traced the reaction to the nitrogen in air and found that when alpha particles were introduced into pure nitrogen gas, the effect was larger. In 1919 Rutherford assumed that the alpha particle knocked a proton out of nitrogen, turning it into carbon. After observing Blackett's cloud chamber images in 1925, Rutherford realized that the opposite was the case: after capture of the alpha particle, a proton is ejected, so that heavy oxygen, not carbon, is the end result i.e. Z is not decremented but incremented. This was the first reported nuclear reaction, N + α → O + p.
Proton | History
Rutherford used alpha particles emitted by radium bromide to infer that J. J. Thomson's Plum pudding model of the atom was fundamentally flawed. In Rutherford's gold foil experiment conducted by his students Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, a narrow beam of alpha particles was established, passing through very thin (a few hundred atoms thick) gold foil. The alpha particles were detected by a zinc sulfide screen, which emits a flash of light upon an alpha particle collision. Rutherford hypothesized that, assuming the "plum pudding" model of the atom was correct, the positively charged alpha particles would be only slightly deflected, if at all, by the dispersed positive charge predicted.
Alpha particle | History of discovery and use
After switching from iron to graphene absorbers, the 1946 experiment dramatically showed that the negatively charged component of cosmic rays decayed radioactive rather than being captured by the graphite.
Marcello Conversi | Introduction
Ernest Demetrious Hondros (February 18, 1930 – September 13, 2016) was a British material scientist, and visiting professor at Imperial College London.
Ernest Hondros | Introduction
Between 1953 and 1975, absorbed dose was often measured in rads. Decay activity was measured in curies before 1946 and often in rutherfords between 1946 and 1975.
Becquerel | Definition
Ernest Omar Wollan (November 6, 1902 – March 11, 1984) was an American physicist who made major contributions in the fields of neutron scattering and health physics.
Ernest O. Wollan | Introduction
After graduating from Magdalene College in 1921, Blackett spent ten years working at the Cavendish Laboratory as an experimental physicist with Ernest Rutherford and in 1923 became a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, a position he held until 1933. Rutherford had found out that the nucleus of the nitrogen atom could be disintegrated by firing fast alpha particles into nitrogen. He asked Blackett to use a cloud chamber to find visible tracks of this disintegration, and by 1925, he had taken 23,000 photographs showing 415,000 tracks of ionized particles. Eight of these were forked, and this showed that the nitrogen atom-alpha particle combination had formed an atom of fluorine, which then disintegrated into an isotope of oxygen and a proton.
Patrick Blackett | Career and research
In 1901, Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford discovered that radioactivity was part of the process by which atoms changed from one kind to another, involving the release of energy. Soddy wrote in popular magazines that radioactivity was a potentially "inexhaustible" source of energy, and offered a vision of an atomic future where it would be possible to "transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole earth one smiling Garden of Eden." The promise of an "atomic age," with nuclear energy as the global, utopian technology for the satisfaction of human needs, has been a recurring theme ever since.
Atomic Age | Early years