We return now to England to see if there have been any new developments in the theory of the atom. Ernest Rutherford had just unveiled a new model for the atom—the nuclear atom—that seemed to be in better agreement with experimental observation than the plum pudding model of J. J. Thomson. Since then, little new has unfolded aside from the arrival in Cambridge of a newly minted doctor of physics from Denmark, Niels Bohr.
In 1912, Bohr joined Thomson’s group but the two just couldn’t hit it off. Determined to make the most out of his year abroad, Bohr headed to Manchester to work instead with Rutherford. The two men got along instantly, and would form an alliance that would shake the foundations of physics once again.
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