Ernest Rutherford's great granddaughter, Professor Mary Fowler, is touring New Zealand to celebrate the centenary of the scientist being awarded the Nobel Prize.
Awarded the prize in chemistry in 1908 and a baronetcy in 1931 (Baron Rutherford of Nelson) Lord Rutherford was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century: Einstein described him as the man who "tunnelled into the very material of God".
Rutherford and his colleagues helped shape the 20th century, and he effectively created modern atomic physics and opened up the era of nuclear physics with three major discoveries.
Lord Rutherford's first discovery - that elements are not immutable, but can change their structure naturally, from heavy elements to slightly lighter one - led to his Nobel Prize win at the age of 37, for his work on the transmutation of elements and the chemistry of radioactive material.
His second discovery, the nuclear model of the atom, provided a way to visualise atomic structures - a tiny nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons - and he added to this with a third accomplishment: the splitting of the atom.
Prof Fowler, a geophysicist at Royal Holloway, University of London, began her lecture tour in Christchurch yesterday, 100 years to the day since the Nobel Committee decided to award her ancestor the chemistry prize.
She will give public talks in Nelson tomorrow, Dunedin (November 18), Auckland ( November 20), Hamilton (November 20), New Plymouth (November 24) and Palmerston North (November 25).
Prof Fowler will also be guest speaker on Thursday at the prize-giving at Nelson College, where her great grandfather was head boy and dux, and at a Rutherford Symposium at Otago University on December 3. Tonight , she was due to present the 2008 Rutherford Medal at Te Papa in Wellington a function attended by 380 scientists and technologists.
Overseas, the Royal Society in London will open a special exhibition on December 1, and there will be a reception at the NZ High Commission in London on December 10 to mark the Nobel centenary.