Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937) was a New Zealand born physicist famous for his work on radioactivity and atomic structure. He was awarded a Nobel prize (in chemistry!) "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances". He is most famous for the experiment (carried out under his direction by Geiger and Marsden) where alpha particles were directed at gold foil, and gave a scattering patterns suggesting nearly all the mass of an atom is hight concentrated leaving most of the atom as by comparison little more than 'empty space'. Rutherford is reported to have later reminisced that "It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch [artillery] shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you".
