Dennis Whyte

And you put all these over here because you want to see how they deflect and bend through it.

But you put a control in the experiment.

But you basically put glass plates back here.

Because obviously, everything should just deflect, but nothing should bounce back.

So, it's a control in the experiment.

But what did they see?

They saw things bouncing back.

Like, what the hell?

Like, that fit no model of any idea, right?

But Rutherford, like, refused to, like, ignore what was a clear... Like, they validated it, and he sat down, and based on classical physics, he made the most extraordinary discovery, which was the nucleus, which is a very, very strange discovery.

What I mean by that, because what he could figure out from this is that in order for these particles...

to bounce back and hit this plate, they were hitting something that must be heavier than them.

And that basically something like 99.999% of the mass of the matter that was in this gold foil was in something that contained about one trillionth of the volume of it.

And that's called the nucleus.

And until, and you talk about, so how revealing is this?

It's like, this totally changes your idea of the universe because a nucleus is a very unintuitive, non-intuitive thing.

It's like, why is all the mass in something that is like zero, like basically it was the realization that matter is empty.

It's all empty space.

And it changes everything.

Until you had that, like you had steam engines, by the way, you had telegraph wires, you had all those things.