I believe that Ernest Rutherford helped developed the Atomic theory the most throughout history. He developed this model called the atomic model that described the atom in ways no one had heard before. He also was responsible for many discoveries in radioactive decay and the alpha particle. To start off the atomic theory is that all matter is made up of tiny indivisible particles. He was born August 30, 1871, in Spring Grove, New Zealand. He was the first to split the atom; he was also awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances”. After being titled the “Father of the Nuclear Age” he died in Cambridge, England, October 19, 1937. So why was this guy …show more content…
This led him to develop the model of the atom, which he is most famous for. He was also credited with the discovery of the proton in 1919, which began his discovery of the Neutron. He studied at Canterbury College when he was about 33 for a short time, before he traveled to England in 1895 to study at the Cavendish Lab at the University of Cambridge, where he studied under J.J. Thompson (which would assist in the discovery of the electron). At Cambridge he began his investigation of radioactivity, and ended up inventing and ingenious detector of electromagnetic waves. He then came up with his names for the waves “Alpha” and “Beta” to describe the waves emitted by thorium and uranium. His “disintegration theory” of radio activity recognized radioactivity phenomena as atomic, not molecular, due to the spontaneous disintegration of atoms. Now this discovery led him to the term known as a half-life, (Nobel prize 1908) but another way he called it was the radioactive “decay clock”, which could then be used to help determine the age of the Earth(which turned out to be much larger then they believed at the time). He then turned his time to the experiment of