In the movies we see the scientist portrayed as a quiet and pious man or woman dressed in a white lab coat engrossed in thought. This image surely fits some; however, not the twentieth-century New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, or Lord Rutherford as he would be known later in life. He was born into a large family living in the frontier country of New Zealand with the nearest town thirteen miles away by horseback. This young man would earn a scholarship and travel to England to study at the world-famous Cambridge University. There this boisterous country boy would come into his own in the hallowed halls of Cambridge. Over his long and illustrious career as a physicist, he would create the science we call today nuclear physics, thus shattering the concept of the atom that had held sway since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers. In his day, Rutherford was considered the greatest experimental physicist in the British Empire. No other experimentalist had been so influential since Michael Faraday, the discoverer of electromagnetic induction.