Ernest Rutherford New Zealand-born Rutherford (1871-1937) is considered one of the greatest of all experimental physicists. He discovered the idea of radioactive half-life and showed that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another. He was awarded a Nobel in 1908 “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements”. Rutherford later became director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University where, under his leadership, the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932 and the first experiment to split the nucleus was carried out by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. The element rutherfordium was named after him in 1997.

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