Sir Ernest Rutherford

Sir Ernest Rutherford: "Ernest Rutherford was told, while working on his family's farm in New Zealand, that he had won a scholarship to Cambridge University, his reaction was to stand straight and declare, 'I've just dug my last potato.' That ambition served him well. When the professor was hired in 1898 to work in McGill's then brand-new Macdonald Physics Building, he set his sights on characterizing the recently described phenomenon of radioactivity. He soon came to believe that the strange force was the result of the disintegration of the atom - a revolutionary "