← all shorts

Person

Ernest Marsden

Ernest Marsden, wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and tie, sits against a dark background, exuding a formal and scholarly demeanor.

English-born physicist (1889–1970) who was a twenty-year-old undergraduate when Rutherford asked him whether any alpha particles might bounce back from a metal foil. The expected answer was no; the actual answer rewrote atomic physics. Marsden later emigrated to New Zealand, where he ran the country's scientific establishment for most of the mid-twentieth century and was knighted in 1958.

Mentioned in 1 article