Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) was a booming, big-handed New Zealander who grew up on a farm and went on to discover the nucleus of the atom. He is often called the father of nuclear physics — and he did most of it by firing tiny particles at things and watching where they bounced.
Rutherford shot a beam of particles at a wafer of gold foil. Most sailed straight through, but a
few pinged violently backwards — as if a cannonball had bounced off tissue paper. The only
explanation was that an atom's mass and positive charge are crammed into a tiny dense core, with
electrons out in the emptiness around it. That experiment rewrote the
Rutherford was cheerfully rude about other subjects, and famously grouchy about theorists who only did sums. The delicious irony: when he won a Nobel Prize, it was in Chemistry — the very "stamp collecting" he loved to tease. He joked that the strangest transformation he'd ever seen was his own, from physicist to chemist overnight. He also mentored a stunning number of future Nobel winners, roaring "Talk softly!" through the lab while being anything but quiet himself.