Image uploaded from a quicklink (Image by Unknown Owner) Details DMCA | Last year physicists commemorated the centennial of the discovery of the atomic nucleus. In experiments carried out in Ernest Rutherford's laboratory at Manchester in 1911, a beam of electrically charged particles from the radioactive decay of radium was directed at a thin gold foil....This was great science, but not what one would call big science. Rutherford's experimental team consisted of one postdoc and one undergraduate. Their work was supported by a grant of just  £70 from the Royal Society of London. The most expensive thing used in the experiment was the sample of radium, but Rutherford did not have to pay for it -- the radium was on loan from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. |