Timeline of the Nuclear Age

Events of the...

1900: Frederick Soddy observes spontaneous disintegration of radioactive elements into variants he calls "isotopes."
1902: Ernest Rutherford and Soddy publish theory of radioactive decay.
1903: Becquerel shares Nobel Prize for Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie for 1896 discovery of natural radioactivity.
1904: Rutherford discovers that alpha rays are heavy positively charged particles. In 1908, he is awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work.; J. J. Thomson proposes the "plum-pudding" model of the atom. In it the atom is envisioned as electrons surrounded by a soup of positive charge, like plums surrounded by pudding.
1905: Albert Einstein publishes the special theory of relativity regarding convertibility of matter and energy (E=mc²).

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