Rutherford deduced the nature of the atom. (NZ Herald Archive)
Three years after winning the Nobel Prize for his work on radioactivity, Ernest Rutherford made the second of his major discoveries.
From experiments performed at McGill University in Canada, he deduced the nature of the atom: that almost all of its mass is concentrated in a nucleus a thousand times
smaller than the atom itself.
"This second great discovery gave him enduring fame," writes John Campbell in the DNZB.
"Niels Bohr, a young Dane attracted to work with Rutherford, used his quantum ideas to produce a stable orbit model of the atom.
"The Rutherford-Bohr atom features in chemistry and physics books used in schools worldwide, and Rutherford scattering is still used today to probe sub-nuclear particles and layers of atoms in microelectronic devices."
