ABSTRACT
The discovery of the atomic nucleus opened the gates to a completely new territory, an utterly unexpected entity that took all scientists by surprise. While the idea of an atom had been in the making since the ancient times, and modern chemists had been dealing with them for over a hundred years, Rutherford’s experiments of 1911 ushered the physicists into unchartered terrains. The nucleus showed the theoretical physicists the right way of tackling the problem of the structure of atoms, discovering along the way quantum physics, one of the most encompassing theories ever.
