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“Rutherford regarded “all science as either physics or stamp collecting” but saw the funny side when he received the 1908 Nobel prize for chemistry for this seminal work. By then he was in Manchester.
“Youthful, energetic, boisterous, he suggested anything but the scientist,” was how Chaim Weizmann, then a chemist but later the first president of Israel, remembered Rutherford in Manchester.
“He talked readily and vigorously on any subject under the sun, often without knowing anything about it.
“Going down to the refectory for lunch, I would hear the loud, friendly voice rolling up the corridor.””
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“[Jay] Bilas accompanied [Bill] Raftery to dinner after a Villanova Wildcat game, to Davio’s Northern Italian Steakhouse in Philadelphia earlier this year. “We get there and people start to come in and pretty soon there are 45 people there, and they were going to close, but they don’t close because nobody says no to Bill,” Bilas says. “He spends time with everybody. He doesn’t leave. We don’t leave. Everybody loves Raft. I think he’s a vampire.” If so, he is certainly the most avuncular among the undead.”
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That Rutherford article is pretty good (despite some glaring errors mentioned in the comments), but omits some details of importance to physics and physics teaching.
1) The Thomson model is a classic example of not seeing a paradigm shift when it is staring you in the face. Prior to 1897, “we” thought that electricity consisted of positive and negative fluids and knew (thanks to Hall) that it was the negative fluid that flowed in wires. When the electron was discovered, the negative fluid was replaced with negative (moving) particles — but they kept the positive fluid! So the atom was a droplet of positive fluid with negative particles moving in it like they move in a wire. Why weren’t they bold enough to think that the positive fluid was also made of particles?
2) Someone was bold enough. A Japanese physicist was the first to propose a solar system model for the atom but rejected it himself for the well-known reasons mentioned in the article. It was the unambiguous data of Geiger and Marsden that forced people (starting with Bohr’s flawed model) to think of SOME way that a solar system model could be stable. Experiment does drive physics sometimes.
3) Geiger invented the Geiger counter so he wouldn’t have to sit in the dark for hours on end counting flashes on a scintillator screen.
4) Lawrence built the first accelerator, a cyclotron, a year before Cockcroft and Walton came along. The reason he didn’t discover that fast protons could split the atom was that he turned off his detector when he turned off the cyclotron. He only used the detector to see if his machine was working and missed the new physics. There is a lesson here …