A Rutherford Celebration event

Rutherford: Canada's First Nobel Laureate

John Campbell

University of Canterbury

2008 is the centennial of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Ernest Rutherford “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances”.

It is seldom appreciated elsewhere that Rutherford carried out this research whilst at McGill University from 1898 to 1907, making his the first award of a Nobel prize for research carried out in Canada.

This presentation will describe that work, related work before and after, and why one of the greatest physicists of all time never received a Nobel Prize in Physics. After all, Rutherford later showed that the atom had a nuclear structure, developed a detector to detect individual radioactive decays, was the first to split the atom, proposed that the neutron had to exist, and led the group who built the first particle accelerator to artificially induce a nuclear reaction.

John Campbell, the author of Rutherford Scientist Suprem and http://www.rutherford.org.nz/, recently retired from teaching physics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where Rutherford obtained his first three degrees. Dr. Campbell has several awards for communicating science to the public. His current project is the first ever documentary on Rutherford.