Fun science!

The story of Rutherford and quantum mechanics

Thank you @leesongyi for drawing

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This article has been translated by @zoethehedgehog
Original article in Korean

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I’m not a physics major, but today I came up with an article on quantum mechanics :)

@hunhani wrote a profound article on quantum mechanics, but I’m about to introduce the story of the scientist Sir Ernest Rutherford who contributed to the advancement of quantum mechanics! If you’re interested in science, keep up with my fun science articles. If I have written anything incorrectly, please let me know :)

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At a city in the South Island, Nelson, New Zealand,
There is a statue of a boy.

Image Credit : Wikimedia Commons

Sir Ernest Rutherford (1871~1937)

Ernest was the child of James Rutherford and Martha Thompson. His father did all kinds of work including farming, and his mother was a school teacher.

He was the fourth kid of the twelve children.

Twelve? His mom was one hell of a woman...

Rutherford went to the Cavendy laboratory at the University of Cambridge, supported with the British scholarship and a world fair scholarship.

Originally, another student was nominated as a scholarship student. But that person married and decided to stay in New Zealand. That’s the behind story of how Rutherford became a scholarship student.

Lucky!

Nah, Britain is lucky :)

The Cavendish laboratory is the laboratory that won 29 Nobel prizes with the 6,300 pounds that William Cavendish donated. Twenty nine! (Rayleigh who discovered Argon, Thompson who found the electron, and Watson & Crick who found the double helix structure of DNA and so on.)

Wow, 29 from one laboratory! Impressive!

But after 1989 there were no more Nobelists :(

The time when Rutherford went to the Cavendish laboratory was when JJ Thompson was in charge, after Maxwell and Rayleigh

That year Conrad Röntgen found the X ray!

Röntgen : ‘Dunno what it is but it exists! Let’s name it X ray…’
Now it’s used for lots of areas like X ray examinations, CT scanning and others.

By Wilhelm Röntgen; current version created by Old Moonraker. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The following year, Antoine Becquerel found radiation coming from uranium.

Becquerel: ‘I named it the Becquerel ray…’

Rutherford also dived in to the study of radiation. He studied the radiation coming from the uranium and discovered that the ray wasn’t singular.

There were two kinds of rays.
One that was blocked by paper and one that went through. There were also types of radiation that were blocked by thin metallic plate such as aluminium, and there were radiations that went through aluminium. He named these types of radiation alpha, beta, and gamma ray.

Rutherford made the alpha ray pass the magnetic field to verify the properties of it. According to Michael Faradey and James Maxwell an electron bends in the magnetic field. J.J Thompson has found the negative electron using these properties.

The alpha ray bent in the opposite direction of the electron. It had positive electricity. It didn’t bend as much as an electron but it was heavier.

As he measured the quantity of electric charge, the charge of an alpha particle was +2e while the charge of an electron is -1e.

Rutherford thought of another experiment that involves using the alpha particle. The experiment shook the notion of what atoms look like.

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Please let me know if anything has to be corrected :)

You can find lots of other articles on science on #science.