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The Science of Atoms
By 1920 quite a lot of things about atoms had been discovered and it was a really fruitful time for this. The most important thing was back in 1909 by Ernest Rutherford who showed that actually atoms weren't a big blob. And what happened in the early 1930s is that some people in Rutherford's lab started basically just smashing these nuclei together. They worked out if they put lots of energy and they could overcome this repulsion.