Rutherford’s gold foil experiment in 1911 proved that most of the mass and positive charge is concentrated in a small dense atomic core nucleus. It became clear in the 1930s that a strong force was needed to hold all the protons and newly discovered neutrons together. Chien-Shiung Wu’s experiment in the 1950s demonstrated that only the strong interaction was physically significant in holding the nucleus together. All the mass of the nucleus is in the strong interaction and the energies of the universe that concentrate through this strong interaction are what give the key to comprehension of how the nucleus opens possibilities for developing a new physics of the universe.
