Ernest Rutherford: Who discovered the proton?

Ernest Rutherford: Who discovered the proton?

Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand-born British physicist, was the central figure in the study of radioactivity, and with his concept of the nuclear atom, he led the exploration of nuclear physics. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 and was president of the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the 1920s.

In his early life, Rutherford received a bachelor of arts degree and won a scholarship for a postgraduate year of study at Canterbury. He completed this at the end of 1893, earning a master of arts degree with first-class honors in physical science, mathematics, and mathematical physics. He was encouraged to remain yet another year in Christchurch to conduct independent research. Rutherford’s investigation of the ability of a high-frequency electrical discharge, such as that from a capacitor, to magnetize iron earned him a bachelor of science degree at the end of 1894.

After the discovery of the electron, scientists realized there must be positive charge centers within the atom to balance the negative electrons. Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus demonstrated that these positive charges were concentrated in a very small fraction of the atoms' volume. In the early 1920s, Rutherford and other physicists made a number of experiments, transmitting one atom into another. Hydrogen was present in every case study because the atom supposedly had one positively charged particle. It was observed that the hydrogen nucleus played a major role in the atomic structure, and by comparing nuclear masses to charges, it was realized that the positive charge of any nucleus could be accounted for by a number of hydrogen nuclei. By the late 1920s, physicists were regularly referring to hydrogen nuclei as 'protons'. Rutherford named it the proton from the Greek word "photos," meaning "first."

New discoveries have made advancements to the proton. Operations for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), one of the most complex machines ever created. The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator, buried 100 meters under the French and Swiss countryside with a 17-mile circumference. The LHC collides two beams of protons together at the highest energies ever achieved in a laboratory. The experiments are conducted to understand the nature of the most basic building blocks of the universe and how they interact with each other. This is fundamental science at its most basic.

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