Ernest Rutherford was a British physicist born on August 30, 1871 in Brightwater, New Zealand. As a former student of JJ Thomson, Rutherford proved Thomson's plum pudding structure incorrect. Rutherford's most famous experience involved using a beam of alpha particles aimed at gold foil and recorded the location on a fluorescent screen as it passed through the foil. As Rutherford expected, most alpha particles passed through the foil, there were a small number that reflected backward or at an angle. Ernest Rutherford concluded that the atom is mostly empty space with nearly it's entire mass surrounding a positively charged tiny nucleus with negatively charged electrons at a distance. This discovery is considered to be Ernest Rutherford's greatest scientific work. Rutherford is known as a central figure for his pioneering studies of radioactivity and the atom. He led the exploration of nuclear physics after discovering that there were two types of radiation, alpha and beta particles, coming from uranium. Rutherford discovered radon and discovered by bombarding light atoms with alpha rays and changing nitrogen into oxygen it would be possible to split an atom. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 and later died on October 19, 1937 in Cambridge, United Kingdom.