In March 1913, a 27-year-old Danish physicist sent Ernest Rutherford, his former supervisor in Manchester, a paper that shouldn’t have worked. It borrowed a strange, unproven idea from Max Planck’s theory of heat radiation and welded it onto Rutherford’s own nuclear atom, and in doing so it explained something no one had been able to…
In 1909, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at the University of Manchester was handed an experiment nobody expected to produce anything. Ernest Rutherford told him to check whether alpha particles, fired at a thin sheet of gold foil, ever bounced straight back. They weren’t supposed to. The prevailing model of the atom offered no mechanism for it….
For most of scientific history, atoms were a guess dressed up as a philosophy. The idea that matter is built from tiny, indivisible units goes back to ancient Greece, but for over two thousand years nobody had a way to actually check it. That changed between 1803 and 1908, when a self-taught English chemist, a…
