Quantum theory bloomed while nuclear studies stalled. Rutherford had felt optimistic enough in 1923 to shout at the annual meeting of the British Association, “We are living in the heroic age of physics!” By 1927, in a paper on atomic structure, he was a little less confident.575 “We are not yet able to do more than guess at the structure even of the lighter and presumably least complex atoms,” he writes.576 He proposed a structure nonetheless, with electrons in the nucleus orbiting around nuclear protons, an atom within an atom.
