What Has Nuclear Physics Ever Given Us?

Physics





Photo credit:

A simulated event in the CMS detector of the Large Hadron Collider, featuring a possible appearance of the Higgs boson. Lucas Taylor/Wikipedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

This year marks the 103rd anniversary of the birth of nuclear physics, when Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden’s experiments at the University of Manchester led them to conclude that atoms consist of tiny, positively-charged nuclei orbited by negatively-charged electrons.