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“IT WAS quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” This was how Ernest Rutherford described the experiments performed in his lab at the University of Manchester by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909 that led to the discovery of the atomic nucleus. Since then physicists have found that the nucleus itself is indeed an incredible place a complex structure that takes on a variety of guises, making it difficult to understand using just…