Painting of Ernest Rutherford by Oswald Birley, 1934 (Alexander Turnbull Library, G-826-2) Ernest Rutherford’s discoveries about the nature of atoms shaped modern science and paved the way for nuclear physics. Albert Einstein called him a ‘second Newton’ who had ‘tunnelled into the very material of God’. Born in 1871 near Nelson, Rutherford was to claim that his inventiveness was honed by the challenges he faced working on his parents’ farm: ‘We haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think’.
