Rutherford

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Ernest Rutherford. He was the father of nuclear science, a great charismatic figure who mapped the landscape of the sub-atomic world. He identified the atom’s constituent parts, discovered that elemental decay was the cause of radiation and became the first true alchemist in the history of science when he forced platinum to change into gold. He was born at the edge of the Empire in 1871, the son of Scottish immigrant farmers and was working the fields when a telegram came from the great British physicist J J Thomson asking him to come to Cambridge. Rutherford immediately laid down his spade saying “that’s the last potato I ever dig”. It was. He went on to found a science, win a Nobel Prize and pioneer the ‘big science’ of the twentieth century.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Simon Schaffer 24 episodes
  Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge
• Jim Al-Khalili 8 episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Surrey
• Patricia Fara 17 episodes
  Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge

Related episodes

• The Neutron
  
  14 Apr, 2016 530 Physics
• Nuclear Physics
  
  10 Jan, 2002 530 Physics
• Paul Dirac
  
  5 Mar, 2020 530 Physics
• Radiation
  
  12 Nov, 2009 530 Physics
• The Invention of Radio
  
  4 Jul, 2013 620 Engineering
• The Electron
  
  29 Sep, 2022 530 Physics
• Michael Faraday
  
  24 Dec, 2015 530 Physics
• Crystallography
  
  29 Nov, 2012 540 Chemistry
• Bertrand Russell
  
  6 Dec, 2012 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Albert Einstein
  
  14 Sep, 2023 500 Science
• Maxwell
  
  2 Oct, 2003 530 Physics
• John Dalton
  
  27 Oct, 2016 540 Chemistry
• The Curies
  
  26 Mar, 2015 540 Chemistry
• Rosalind Franklin
  
  22 Feb, 2018 570 Biology
• Robert Boyle
  
  12 Jun, 2014 540 Chemistry
• Relativity
  
  6 Jun, 2013 530 Physics
• The Manhattan Project
  
  7 Oct, 2021 620 Engineering
• William and Caroline Herschel
  
  11 Nov, 2021 520 Astronomy
• George and Robert Stephenson
  
  26 Mar, 2020 620 Engineering
• Bergson and Time
  
  9 May, 2019 110 Metaphysics

---

Programme ID: p004y23q

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y23q

Auto-category: 539.7 (Atomic and nuclear physics)