Rutherford, Ernest proton discovery

Rutherford continued to do research until his death, but the proton was his last big discovery. It was not, however, his last big honor. In 1931, the New Zealand country boy was raised to the peerage with the official name of Ernest, Lord Rutherford of Nelson. After his death six years later, he was awarded one last honor. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, where he keeps company with Isaac Newton and a handful of other great British scientists. 

During the period since the first publication of this book in 1930 death has taken many of the pioneers of modem chemistry. Marie Curie became a victim of radium-the element of her own discovery. Frederick G. Banting returned from the first World War with the idea that he would try to conquer diabetes, and he did. He then lost his life in an airplane accident while in the service of Great Britain during the second World War. Death also took the great Joseph J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron, and his brilliant student, Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the proton. Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, two of the leading architects of the new nuclear age, are also no longer with us. 

In 1911, the British physicist and Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) published the article The Scattering of Alpha and Beta Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom in Philosophical Magazine. In this article, Rutherford reported the results of an experiment that demonstrated that the protons and electrons in atoms are not distributed homogeneously. Instead, the protons are concentrated in a relatively tiny region Rutherford called the nucleus (from the Latin, meaning kernel ). The electrons are extranuclear electrons are located in a relatively much larger volume of space surrounding the nucleus. Rutherford s discovery of the nucleus was immediately accepted within the scientific community. However, the relationship, if any, between atomic structure and properties was still unclear. 

Experiments were under way to understand how electricity and matter interact when the discoveries of x-rays and radioactivity were announced. Scientists trying to understand this new phenomena radioactivity experimented day and night. Ernest Rutherford was one of the many. He tried to understand the nature of radioactivity and classified it into three basic types. While trying to find out more about radioactivity, he conducted his gold foil experiment that ultimately provided greater insight into the subatomic nature of the atom by discovering the nucleus. He also identified the proton present in the nucleus. 

On February 27, 1932, in a letter to the British journal Nature, physicist James Chadwick of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, Ernest Rutherford s laboratory, announced the possible existence of a neutron. (He confirmed the neutron s existence in a longer paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society four months later, but Szilard would no more have doubted it at the time of Chadwick s first cautious announcement than did Chadwick himself like many scientific discoveries, it was obvious once it was demonstrated, and Szilard could repeat the demonstration in Berlin if he chose.) The neutron, a particle with nearly the same mass as the positively charged proton that until 1932 was the sole certain component of the atomic nucleus, had no electric charge, which meant it... 

Even though protons and electrons had been identified as subatomic particles, the arrangement of these particles within the atom was not known. An atom was thought to be a uniform sphere of protons within which electrons circulated in rings. Only after the discovery of natural radioactivity did Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) carry out experiments that led to the idea of a nucleus as a tiny core of the atom. 

It wasn t until 1932 that the final piece of the atomic puzzle was put into place. After 4 years as a ROW in Germany during World War I, James Chadwick returned to England to work with his former mentor Ernest Rutherford, who had taken over J. J. Thomson s position as Cavendish Professor at Cambridge University. It was not long before Rutherford appointed Chadwick as the assistant director of the nuclear physics lab. In the years immediately following Rutherford s discovery that the nucleus contained protons, which existed in the nucleus and whose charges were... 

Beginning with J.J. Thomson s discovery of the electron in 1897, developments came quickly. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford proposed the nuclear structure of the atom, and by 1920 he had named the proton and the neutron. All of this work was made possible by the discovery of X-rays in 1895, which allowed physicists to probe the atom, and by the discovery of radioactivity in 1896. The phenomenon of radioactivity destroyed the ancient concept of the immutability of the atom once and for all and demonstrated that one element could be transformed into another, thus in a sense achieving the goal that the alchemists had sought in vain. 

It was especially hampered by the fact that the electron was not even discovered until 1897, the proton shortly thereafter, and the neutron not until 1932. Even the existence of the atomic nnclens was unknown until its discovery in England in 1911 by the New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937). Scientists also had not yet understood the concepts of atomic number or isotopes. 

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