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It is named after physicist Ernest Rutherford. As a synthetic element, it is not found in nature and can only be made in a particle accelerator. It is radioactive; the most stable known isotope, 267 Rf, has a half-life of about 48 minutes. In the periodic table, it is a d-block element and the second of the fourth-row transition elements.
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand physicist who was a pioneering researcher in both atomic and nuclear physics. He has been described as "the father of nuclear physics", [ 7 ] and "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday ". [ 8 ]
However, Rutherford did not attempt to make the direct connection of central charge to atomic number, since gold's "atomic number" (at that time merely its place number in the periodic table) was 79, and Rutherford had modelled the charge to be about +100 units (he had actually suggested 98 units of positive charge, to make half of 196). Thus ...
Like the periodic table, the list below organizes the elements by the number of protons in their atoms; it can also be organized by other properties, such as atomic weight, density, and electronegativity. For more detailed information about the origins of element names, see List of chemical element name etymologies.
That theory refined Ernest Rutherford's and Antonius van den Broek's model, which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its (atomic) number in the periodic table. [2] [3]
In 1913, van den Broek further proposed that the electric charge of an atom's nucleus, expressed as a multiplier of the elementary charge, is equal to the element's sequential position on the periodic table. Rutherford defined this position as being the element's atomic number. [73] [74] [75]
Following the discovery of the atomic nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1911, Antonius van den Broek proposed that the place of each element in the periodic table (its atomic number) is equal to its nuclear charge.
Ernest Rutherford, in various articles in which he discussed van den Broek's idea, used the term "atomic number" to refer to an element's position on the periodic table. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] No writer before Rutherford is known to have used the term "atomic number" in this way, so it was probably he who established this definition.