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Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand physicist who was a pioneering researcher in both atomic and nuclear physics. He has been described as "the father of nuclear physics", [ 7 ] and "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday ". [ 8 ]
The atom was fully split in a controlled manner in 1932 by British and Irish researchers John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton under Rutherford’s supervision.
Atoms split naturally, but in 1919, Rutherford oversaw the first artificially-induced nuclear reaction in human history at the Victoria University of Manchester's laboratories.
[12] [13] 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). [14] Niels Bohr improved upon this in 1913 by reconciling it with the quantum behaviour of electrons (the Bohr model). [15] [16] [17]
Rutherford stated, "...we must conclude that the nitrogen atom is disintegrated," while the newspapers stated he had split the atom. This was the first observation of a nuclear reaction, that is, a reaction in which particles from one decay are used to transform another atomic nucleus. It also offered a new way to study the nucleus.
Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner known as the father of nuclear physics, is regarded by many as the first to knowingly split the atom by artificially inducing a nuclear reaction in 1917 while he worked at a university in Manchester in the United Kingdom.
In 1932, physicists John Cockcroft, Ernest Walton, and Ernest Rutherford discovered that when lithium atoms were "split" by protons from a proton accelerator, immense amounts of energy were released in accordance with the principle of mass–energy equivalence. [1]
This was in a gold atom known to be 10 −10 metres or so in radius—a very surprising finding, as it implied a strong central charge less than 1/3000th of the diameter of the atom. The Rutherford model served to concentrate a great deal of the atom's charge and mass to a very small core, but did not attribute any structure to the remaining ...