Global Properties of Nuclei

The discovery of the electron and of radioactivity marked the beginning of a new era in the investigation of matter. At that time, some signs of the atomic structure of matter were already clearly visible: e. g. the integer stoichiometric proportions of chemistry, the thermodynamics of gases, the periodic system of the elements or Brownian motion. But the existence of atoms was not yet generally accepted. The reason was simple: nobody was able to really picture these building blocks of matter, the atoms. The new discoveries showed for the first time “particles” emerging from matter which had to be interpreted as its constituents.