Ernest Rutherford
1871–1937 · New Zealander-British · Early Modern
Known for: Discovered the atomic nucleus and pioneered nuclear physics
Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus with his gold foil experiment—firing alpha particles at gold foil and finding that some bounced straight back, proving atoms have a dense, positive core. He said it was 'as if you fired a cannon shell at tissue paper and it came back and hit you.'
He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (not Physics, to his amusement) and mentored an extraordinary number of Nobel laureates. He split the atom in 1917—the first artificial nuclear reaction.
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