One such figure is Ernest Rutherford, born in 1871 near Nelson on the South Island of New Zealand. As a child he tinkered around the family farms and flax mills in the beautiful Marlborough Sound region. From 1890 through 1894, "Ern" attended Canterbury College in Christchurch where he earned three degrees. Then in 1895, Rutherford left New Zealand for Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge in England. There, J.J. Thompson, the discoverer of the electron, invited him to turn to more basic research, and soon thereafter, Rutherford began the study of radioactivity. This work continued in Montreal at McGill University where he discovered two types of radioactive rays. In 1908, before his 40th birthday, he received the Noble Prize in Chemistry for his "investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemical properties of radioactive substances."

Rutherford's greatest work was yet to come. Back in England at the University of Manchester, Rutherford and Hans Geiger showed that alpha rays pass through gold foil with little deviation, except that rarely--perhaps once in several thousand--they are scattered widely, even reflecting backwards. "It was as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a sheet of tissue paper and it came back to hit you." Rutherford had a booming voice, and often remarked that "swearing will make a experiment work better."  A key insight just before Christmas 1910, that alpha rays were tiny particles which are scattered by the dense, central concentration of mass and charge, led to a revolutionary model of atomic structure in which a nucleus containing virtually all the mass is surrounded by electrons which occupy all the space. Atoms are mostly empty space.

Remarkably, the significance of this discovery was scarcely appreciated at the time, even by Rutherford himself. His research continued, and in 1918, Rutherford became the first successful alchemist, using alpha particles to change nitrogen into oxygen. As an elder statesman of physics, Rutherford returned to direct the Cavendish Laboratory, and he become Baron Rutherford of Nelson in 1931. His ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey in London near Lord Kelvin and Isaac Newton.

Despite tremendous advancements, physicists still work on big, unanswered questions. Today, unlike the "golden era," you can participate in that scientific discovery. Einstein@Home is a distributed computing project that employs your idle computer in the search for pulsars using data from the LIGO interferometers. Registered users will be given partial credit for any discoveries made with their computer. Still in its ramp-up phase, eventually computers all over the world will be engaged in the search for gravity waves. And even if you fall short of rewriting the textbooks like Einstein and Rutherford, you get something they never imagined: an attractive rotating sky globe screen saver. Then again, 100 years from now you might be remembered as a co-discoverer of gravity waves!

As I write this, BOINC is looking for pulsars on two, ancient WIndows computers in my study. In the meantime, Google searches for either Einstein or Rutherford will return heaps of information. In addition, I found these books to be useful: R.P. Crease's The Prism and the Pendulum, I. James' Remarkable Physicists, M. Oliphant's Rutherford - Recollections of the Cambridge Days, and D. Wilson's Rutherford. Moondark is written by Doug Miller, published online, and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News. Last revised on 21 March 2005,  the text and images are copyright © 2005 by Douglas C. Miller, All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission.