Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was born on the 30th of August in 1871 and died on the 19th of October in 1937. Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Some books consider him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday. In some of his early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the nuclear transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. This was completed in McGill University in Canada. It’s the basis for the Nobel prize in chemistry he was awarded in 1908. In 1907 he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei.