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 Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his
wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England.[5]
James had emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland, "to raise a
little flax and a lot of children". Ernest was born at Spring Grove (now
Brightwater), near Nelson, New Zealand. His first name was mistakenly
spelled @
 when his birth was registered.[6]
 He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a
scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand
where he was president of the debating society, among other things.
After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of research at
the forefront of electrical technology, in 1895 Rutherford travelled to
England for postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University
of Cambridge (1895±1898),[7] and he briefly held the world record for
the distance over which electromagnetic waves could be detected.
 In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to succeed Hugh Longbourne
Callendar in the chair of Macdonald Professor of physics at McGill
University in Montreal, Canada, where he did the work that gained him
the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. In 1900 he gained a DSc from the
University of New Zealand. Also in 1900 he married Mary Georgina
Newton (1876±1945); they had one daughter, Eileen Mary (1901±1930),
who married Ralph Fowler. In 1907 Rutherford moved to Britain to take
the chair of physics at the University of Manchester.
 4
9 +*$
0
 1) The positive charge in the atom is
concentrated in the small dense portion,
called the NUCLEUS.
 2) The nucleus is surrounded by the
electrons that move around it in circular
paths called the ORBITS. Thus Rutherford's
model resembles the solar system.
 3) Electrons and the nucleus are held
together by electrostatic forces of attraction.
 9@ ,*+
 In 1909, two researchers in Ernest Rutherford's
laboratory at the University of Manchester, Hans
Geiger and Ernest Marsden, fired a beam of alpha
particles at a thin metal foil. Alpha particles had been
identified and named (they were called "alpha rays"
to begin with) a decade earlier by Rutherford, as one
of the types of radiation given off by radioactive
elements such as uranium. Being fast-moving and
positively charged (they're now known to be high-
speed helium nuclei), Rutherford reasoned they'd
serve as a good probe of the atomic structure of
matter.
 9'

 Instead, in 1911, Rutherford cooked up a new model of the atom in which all of
the positive charge is crammed inside a tiny, massive nucleus about ten
thousand times smaller than the atom as a whole. That's equivalent in scale to
a marble in the middle of a football stadium. The much lighter electrons, he
assumed, lay well outside the nucleus. To the shock and amazement of
everyone, the atoms of which planets, people, pianos, and everything else are
made consisted almost entirely of empty space.
Rutherford's nuclear model of the atom was a huge step forward in
understanding nature at the ultrasmall scale. But even as it closed the
casebook on the alpha particle experiment, it threw open another one. Since
the nucleus and its retinue of electrons are oppositely charged, and therefore
attract one another, there didn't seem anything to stop the electrons from being
pulled immediately into the nucleus. Throughout the universe, atomic matter
ought to implode in the wink of an eye. Rutherford countered by saying that the
atom was like a miniature solar system: the electrons circled the nucleus in
wide orbits just as planets orbit the sun. This is the picture of atoms that most
of us still carry around in our heads. It's an appealing, easy-to-grasp image ±
one that's inspired many a logo of the atomic age. Yet theorists were well
aware of its shortcomings right from the start.