Ernest Rutherford grew up on a New Zealand farm, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry despite considering himself a physicist, and made the discovery that shattered the classical model of matter — that atoms are mostly empty space with a tiny, dense nucleus at the center. He then became the first person to deliberately split an atomic nucleus, opening the door to nuclear energy and nuclear weapons while insisting that anyone who talked about harnessing atomic power was talking “moonshine.”

This episode traces Rutherford from his New Zealand origins through the alpha particle experiments, the discovery of the nucleus, the first artificial nuclear reaction, and the laboratory culture that trained more Nobel laureates than any other in history.

• Rutherford’s New Zealand farm childhood and the scholarship that brought him to Cambridge
• The gold foil experiment — the discovery that atoms are mostly empty space
• Splitting the atom and his famous dismissal of nuclear energy as practical nonsense
• The Cavendish Laboratory under Rutherford and the generation of Nobel laureates he trained