154 years ago today, August 30, 1871 (July 15, 1871 in the lunar calendar), New Zealand physicist Rutherford was born. Rutherford was born Rutherford was the greatest scientist in New Zealand, and he can fully be called one of the greatest experimental physicists of any time. His career almost coincided with the first great period of nuclear physics, and he made many contributions to this field and dominated it for a long time. Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871 in Nelson, New Zealand. He is the fourth of 12 children. He was educated at Cambury College in Christchurch. In 1895, he received a scholarship and entered the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Rutherford had already done some work on high-frequency magnetic fields in New Zealand. After arriving at Cambridge, he still engaged in this research under the guidance of Thomson. It was not until 1896 that he began to study the conductivity of ¦Ö-ray ionized air. In 1898 he moved to Canada as Professor at McGill University. One of his most fruitful eighteen months of collaboration was with Frederick Soddy, an Oxford-trained chemist, who published nine important papers between October 1901 and April 1903, laying the foundations for rigorous research in radiology. Rutherford's first major advance in 1899 was his demonstration that there were two distinct types of radiation, which he called alpha and beta rays. Alpha rays have very little transmission power but produce a lot of ionization, while beta rays have the same transmission power as chi rays but very little ionization power. Rutherford spent another ten years conducting careful experiments and together with Sodi proposed a bold theory of atomic evolution. In 1900, Rutherford pointed out that the third type of radiation was not deflected in a magnetic field and was high-energy electromagnetic radiation, which he called "gamma rays." Rutherford also began to study the radioactive element thorium, which in addition to alpha, beta, and gamma rays emitted a radioactive gas, which he called "emanation." He pointed out that the emanation decays in activity at a specific rate, losing half of its activity over a fixed period (half-life). Rutherford and Sodi began to actively study thorium compounds and pointed out the existence of a more mobile substance, thorium ¦Ö. They finally learned that the emission gas was produced by thorium ¦Ö, which in turn was produced from natural thorium. That is, there is a sequence in which one chemical element is changing (transmuting) into another. In 1905, Rutherford and Sodi published their theory of the transmutation sequence. Rutherford later published a book called New Alchemy, and Sodi continued the work, eventually introducing the concept of isotopes. Rutherford turned his attention to the alpha radiation emitted in radioactive decay, proving that the alpha radiation was composed of helium atoms that had lost two electrons. In 1907 he moved to the University of Manchester, England, to continue his research on alpha radiation. In Manchester, Rutherford and Hans Geiger invented the Geiger counter in 1908. Also here, Geiger and Ernest Marsden studied the scattering of alpha particles through thin metal foils in 1910, following Rutherford's advice. They used a screen coated with zinc sulfide to detect these particles and gave off a brief flash (flicker) when high-energy particles hit the screen. Geiger and Marsden found that the vast majority of particles deflect only slightly as they pass through gold foil, but a very small proportion (1 in approximately 8000) deflect significantly. Rutherford later described it as "the most astonishing event I have ever encountered in my life,... it was as unbelievable as you bombarded a piece of tissue paper with a 15-inch cannonball and the cannonball bounced back and hit you." To explain this result, Rutherford proposed an atomic model in 1911, pointing out that almost all mass is concentrated in a small area, and that most of the area of the atom is "empty space." This is the nuclear atom (although Rutherford did not use the term "nuclear" until 1912). He also proposed a theoretical formula showing the number of particles scattered by a nucleus at different angles. The concept of a nuclear atom was further developed by Niels-Bohr. During the First World War, Rutherford used acoustic methods to detect submarines to serve the Navy. In 1919, after the war, he served as Cavendish Chair Professor and Director of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, England. In 1919, in this laboratory, he made a third important discovery-artificial nuclear transformation. According to some of Marsden's early experiments, a source of alpha particles was placed in a cylinder that could be filled with different gases. A small hole was made at one end of the cylinder and covered with a metal sheet through which some atoms could escape. Filling the cylinder with nitrogen produces high-energy particles, which are hydrogen nuclei (i.e. protons). Rutherford pointed out that "nitrogen atoms disintegrate under the strong action of head-on collisions with high-speed alpha particles, and the released hydrogen atoms are a component of the nitrogen core." Rutherford successfully made the first transformation. Rutherford and James Chadwick went on to point out between 1920 and 1924 that most lighter elements emit protons when bombarded with alpha particles. Rutherford's achievements in this field actually created a completely new discipline-nuclear physics.