Know the scientist: Ernest Rutherford

He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908

Ernest Rutherford (1871 - 1937) was a New Zealand-born British physicist, who postulated the nuclear structure of the atom, which led to the exploration of nuclear physics. He discovered alpha and beta rays, and proposed the laws of radioactive decay. He is often called the "father of nuclear physics". Ernest Rutherford was born in 1871, in Nelson, New Zealand. Ernest received a double major in Mathematics and Physical Science from Canterbury College, the University of New Zealand, Wellington in 1893. He was awarded an Exhibition Science Scholarship, enabling him to go to Trinity College, Cambridge, the U.K., as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory under J.J. Thomson, who was an expert on electromagnetic radiation. In 1895, Rutherford developed a simple apparatus to detect electromagnetic waves, or radio waves.