1871–1937 · New Zealand-born physicist, Nobel laureate in Chemistry 1908
Ernest Rutherford was a farmer’s son from rural New Zealand who discovered the atomic nucleus, split the atom, and ran the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. He was famously loud, famously practical, and famously impatient with mathematical physics — colleagues recalled him keeping theory in its place and preferring an experiment you could point at. That temperament is why the saying fits him so comfortably: it sounds exactly like a man who thought that if you could not say what you had found, you probably had not found it. Which is also, of course, why a saying like this drifts towards him whether or not he said it.