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Particle and nuclear

Particle and nuclear

Breaking boundaries: how the physicist Ernest Rutherford won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry

29 Sep 2022 Matin Durrani

With the 2022 Nobel prizes due to be announced, Physics World editors look at the physicists who’ve won prizes in fields other than their own. Here, Matin Durrani finds out how Ernest Rutherford scooped the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Photo of Ernest Rutherford on a 1971 Soviet Union postage stamp
The face of chemistry: this Soviet-era postage stamp credits Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the atomic nucleus, but the New Zealand-born physicist actually won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for earlier work on radioactivity (Courtesy: istock/popovaphoto)
“I have dealt with many different transformations…but the quickest that I have met was my own tr

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