Nobel Peace Prize winner Ernest Rutherford is known for splitting the atom, however, AUT professor of chemistry Allan Blackman says Rutherford should have won three Nobel prizes for his experiments.
Photo: Wikipedia, CC BY 4.0
Back when radioactivity and x-rays had just been discovered, Rutherford was studying in Cambridge, Prof Blackman says.
“Through that work, he ended up winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908, and I guarantee that if I asked probably the majority of Kiwis what he won the Nobel Prize for, they would say splitting the atom.
“But in fact that's not what he got the Nobel Prize for. He got the Nobel Prize for and I quote his ‘investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances’.”
Basically Rutherford was the first person to explain radioactivity and change the understanding about atoms, he says.
“We really do underestimate this guy because he was an utter scientific Titan. No one less than Einstein called him a second Newton, which is pretty high praise indeed.
“Two more experiments that he did could easily have won Nobel prizes, and indeed he did get nominated for both of these experiments post 1908.”
One of those involved the famous gold foil experiment, where he was able to work out the structure of an atom when he noticed some alpha particles were being deflected.
“This caused Rutherford all sorts of consternation. He really had to sit and think very deeply about what the results of this amazing experiment meant … and it took him about a couple of years to do this.”
From there, he concluded that the nucleus was surrounded by protons, Prof Blackman says.
“That's all, Rutherford’s doing, the word proton.
“And thanks to this experiment, he came up with his model of the atom, that is basically what we understand the atom to be these days. Obviously, it's a little more complicated than that, but the fundamentals of it are still the same.
“So that was one experiment of his that could have won and should have won the Nobel Prize really and the other one is the thing that we've been told at school … that Rutherford split the atom now.
“It's my contention that he didn't split the atom so much as he managed to, let's say, fuse atoms together.”
This involved a nitrogen nucleus capturing an alpha particle, turning the nitrogen atom into an oxygen atom.
“So he became the world's first successful alchemist, even though he didn't realise it at the time, he was more interested in this particular proton that was given off in that process, but that's his third great achievement, was this so-called splitting of the atom, which in fact is not a splitting of the atom.”
Prof Blackman says seeing these lifetime achievements of Rutherford should be enough for us to hold him in higher regard.
“The esteem in which he has held or should be held is shown by the fact that eight of his students, no fewer for goodness sake, and co-workers ended up winning Nobel prizes themselves.
“So he was an extraordinary mentor to a vast number of great scientists. I think he's a little bit underappreciated in this country.”
