Today, bolometers have been replaced in our spectrometers by electronic detectors, and Langley is mostly remembered for his contributions to the development of airplanes, his focus after he left ...

Ernest Rutherford's family emigrated from England to New Zealand before he was born. They ran a successful farm near Nelson, where Ernest was born. One of 12 children, he liked the hard work and ...

Scientists have calculated the Earth to be 4.54 billion years old, with an uncertainty of 50 million years on either side.

"The Crocodile" was Ernest Rutherford's nickname, given by his colleague Pyotr Kapitsa. It came from the idea that a ...

As a young boy growing up in rural New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford once tried to measure the distance of a thunderstorm by counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder. His father ...

Manchester is the birthplace of nuclear physics and this year marks 100 years since Ernest Rutherford ‘split the atom’ at The University of Manchester…or does it? In 1917, the Nobel Prize winner ...

All science is either physics or stamp collecting, the physicist Ernest Rutherford supposedly said, distinguishing what he saw as the pursuit of deep principles from the accumulation of endless ...

Three years after winning the Nobel Prize for his work on radioactivity, Ernest Rutherford made the second of his major discoveries. From experiments performed at McGill University in Canada ...

JJ Thomson studied electrical discharges in gases. Following the discovery of x-rays and radioactivity his imaginative work inspired many young researchers, including Ernest Rutherford, WL Bragg and ...

Building on Curie's work, Ernest Rutherford famously argued at a 1904 academic lecture (attended by Kelvin!) that radioactivity was the unknown energy source Kelvin had suggested. Radioactive ...