Dennis Whyte

And by the way, here's the sun, and we can look at the sun, and we can figure out it's made out of hydrogen.

And Lord Kelvin actually made a very famous calculation, who was basically one of the founders of thermodynamics.

So you look at the hydrogen.

Hydrogen has a certain energy content.

You know the latent heat, basically, of hydrogen.

We know the mass of the sun because we knew the size of it.

And he conclusively proved that basically the sun could only make net energy for about 2,000 or 3,000 years.

So therefore all this nonsense about like deep – because clearly the sun can only last for 2,000 or 3,000 years if you think about the – and this is basically the chemical energy content of hydrogen.

And what comes along in one decade basically one guy sitting in a postal office in Switzerland figures out that all these – Einstein of course –

Which was, like, figured out all this, like, took these seemingly unconnected things and it's like, boom, there it is.

This is what, it wasn't just him, but it was, like, there's quantum physics.

Like, this explains this other disaster.

And then this other guy, my hero, Ernest Rutherford, experimentalist.

did the most extraordinary experiment which is like which was that okay they had these funny rocks they emitted these particles in fact they called them alpha particles alpha just a in the alphabet right because it was the first thing that they discovered and what were they doing so they were they were taking these alpha particles and i by the way i do this to all my students because it's a demonstration of what you should be as a good scientist

So he took these alpha things, and he was a classically trained physicist, knew everything about momentum scattering and stuff like that.

And he took this and these alpha, which clearly were some kind of energy, but they couldn't quite figure out what it was.

So he said, let's try to figure that.

We'll actually use this to try to probe the nature of matter.

So he took this.

took these alpha particles and a very, very thin gold foil.