Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
would repeat the process. Just as Kelvin had carried around a specimen of a radio-
active mineral, so too did Madame Curie carry test tubes of radioactive material,
storing them in her desk drawer. In 1934, she died from leukemia, one year before
her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie and Irene's husband Fredric Joliot themselves won
the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Half Lives
Physicists and chemists leapt on the exciting new discoveries and began feverishly
to explore the strange new rays. The most productive was a young New Zealander
society of providing educational scholarships to deserving students, it is Ruther-
ford's. How else would this young man have made the journey from a small family
farm to the Nobel Prize? His first scholarship award allowed Rutherford to attend
Nelson College, close to the family farm on the South Island. Having excelled
there, he next received a scholarship to Canterbury College of the University of
New Zealand. Excelling once again, in 1895 he won a scholarship to Cambridge
University, where his intellect and gifts as an experimentalist again made him
stand out. Rutherford went from Cambridge to the chair of physics at McGill
University in Montreal. In 1918 he became director of the famous Cavendish Lab-
oratory at Cambridge, where he had done his post graduate work.
Ernest Rutherford ranks not only as one of the greatest experimentalists in the
history of science but as one of the most inspiring mentors. Not only did he win
the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for his work on radioactivity, under his dir-
ection four scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory themselves became Nobelists.
Some of his students would go on to lead the discovery of plate tectonics in the
1960s. Just as the emissions from radioactive atoms induced radioactivity in other
nearby atoms, so proximity to Rutherford inspired his students and colleagues to
reach beyond themselves.
While a student at the Cavendish, Rutherford and his thesis professor, J. J.
Thomson (no relation to Kelvin), discovered that when X-rays pass through a gas,
they engender a host of charged atoms or, as Michael Faraday had named them,
ions. Rutherford wondered whether Becquerel's new uranium rays would also ion-
ize air. He found that they did but also discovered that the uranium rays were not
X-rays. Becquerel had already found that when the uranium rays pass through a
magnetic field, some veer to one side, indicating that they have a negative charge,
while others swerve to the opposite side, showing that they have a positive charge.
Rutherford named the negative rays beta and the positive rays alpha, the names by
