In 1911, 40-year-old Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom. That is the usual, simple, factual statement most science students know quite well. The story of this discovery, however, involves more than one person, research over several decades, and a very human story. So begins the new web exhibit, Rutherford's Nuclear World, on the website of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. Since the 1990s, AIP's History Programs have been path breakers in the use of the internet to preserve and make known the history of physics. The new Rutherford exhibit joins a dozen others, on topics ranging from Albert Einstein and Marie Curie to the transistor and the laser. The original goal of the new exhibit was to get beneath the surface of the 1911 discovery of the nucleus. I started out to tell how the discovery occurred, to challenge both newcomers to the history of physics and old hands to reevaluate simple discovery. I was surprised to find one of Rutherford's students from that time, Edward Andrade, say that there was no excitement about the discovery of the nucleus in 1911. Andrade wrote ...the nuclear theory of the atom attracted hardly any attention. Its immense significance was not realized. Even Rutherford reflected back in 1932, in a letter to his old colleague Hans Geiger of Manchester days, Those were happy times in Manchester, and we wrought better than we knew.
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