It is just as surprising as if a gunner fired a shell at a single sheet of paper and for some reason or other the projectile bounded back again.

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Rutherford, discussing the results of a 1909 experiment investigating alpha particle scattering, during the Cawthron Lecture at the Cawthron Institute in Nelson, New Zealand in 1925. Quoted in Arthur Stewart Eve (1939). Rutherford: Being the Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Lord Rutherford, O. M., p. 311

More quotes by Ernest Rutherford

It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

Radioactivity is shown to be accompanied by chemical changes in which new types of matter are being continually produced. … The conclusion is drawn that these chemical changes must be sub-atomic in character.

I do not know if you appreciate the fact that long papers have a way of frightening readers, who feel that they have not time to dip into them.

The study of the radio-active substances and of the discharge of electricity through gases has supplied very strong experimental evidence in support of the fundamental ideas of the existing atomic theory. It has also indicated that the atom itself is not the smallest unit of matter but is a complicated structure made up of a number of smaller bodies.

Radio-activity (1904)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ernest Rutherford (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.

It is just as surprising as if a gunner fired a shell at a single sheet of paper and for some reason or other the projectile bounded back again.

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