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Transcript: The man who did a decisive set of experiments in the early 20th century to demonstrate the atomic structure of matter was Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford was born in New Zealand to a poor family and passed through his entire education dependent on scholarships. By the end of his life, however, he would have won a Nobel Prize, been head of the famed Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and he was made a lord by the British government. From his humble beginnings, Rutherford was relentless in his search for the fundamental nature of matter. He established a laboratory at the Cavendish where he did a beautiful series of experiments to understand the nature of normal matter. Rutherford was a bear of a man with a booming voice and an intense manner. He could be a tough boss, sometimes sweeping the lab at the end of the day to send people home not to be with their families or wives but to think more deeply about the experiments that they had just been conducting. Students however loved him, and they flocked to him large numbers. Rutherford thought a good theory had to be explained simply, and this was a great benefit to him in his science. |