<P> When Geiger reported to Rutherford that he had spotted alpha particles being strongly deflected, Rutherford was astounded . In a lecture Rutherford delivered at Cambridge University, he said: </P> <P> 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 . On consideration, I realized that this scattering backward must be the result of a single collision, and when I made calculations I saw that it was impossible to get anything of that order of magnitude unless you took a system in which the greater part of the mass of the atom was concentrated in a minute nucleus . It was then that I had the idea of an atom with a minute massive centre, carrying a charge . </P> <P> Accolades soon flooded in . Hantaro Nagaoka, who had once proposed a Saturnian model of the atom, wrote to Rutherford from Tokyo in 1911: "Congratulations on the simpleness of the apparatus you employ and the brilliant results you obtained". The conclusions of these experiments revealed how all matter on Earth is structured and thus affected every scientific and engineering discipline, making it one of the most pivotal scientific discoveries of all time . The astronomer Arthur Eddington called Rutherford's discovery the most important scientific achievement since Democritus proposed the atom ages earlier . </P> <P> Like most scientific models, Rutherford's atomic model was neither perfect nor complete . According to classical Newtonian physics, it was in fact impossible . Accelerating charged particles radiate electromagnetic waves, so an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus in theory would spiral into the nucleus as it loses energy . To fix this problem, scientists had to incorporate quantum mechanics into Rutherford's model . </P>

When did the discovery of the atom happen
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