In the beginning Rutherford worked on radio waves, and with some distinction—he managed to transmit a crisp signal more than a mile, a very reasonable achievement for the time—but gave it up when he was persuaded by a senior colleague that radio had little future. On the whole, however, Rutherford didn't thrive at the Cavendish. After three years there, feeling he was going nowhere, he took a post at McGill University in Montreal, and there he began his long and steady rise to greatness. By the time he received his Nobel Prize (for "investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances," according to the official citation) he had moved on to Manchester University, and it was there, in fact, that he would do his most important work in determining the structure and nature of the atom.
开头，卢瑟福研究无线电波，取得了一点成绩——他成功地把一个清脆的信号发送到了1公里之外，这在当时是一个相当可以的成就——但是，他放弃了，因为有一位资深同事劝他，无线电没有多大前途。总的来说，卢瑟福在卡文迪许实验室的事业不算兴旺。他在那里待了3年，觉得自己没有多大作为，便接受了蒙特利尔麦克·吉尔大学的一个职位，从此稳步走上了通向辉煌的漫长之路。到他获得诺贝尔奖（引用官方记录，他因对元素衰变和放射性物质化学机理的调查研究获此殊荣）的时候，他已经转到曼彻斯特大学。其实是在那里，他将取得最重要的成果，确定原子的结构和性质。

By the early twentieth century it was known that atoms were made of parts—Thomson's discovery of the electron had established that—but it wasn't known how many parts there were or how they fit together or what shape they took. Some physicists thought that atoms might be cube shaped, because cubes can be packed together so neatly without any wasted space. The more general view, however, was that an atom was more like a currant bun or a plum pudding: a dense, solid object that carried a positive charge but that was studded with negatively charged electrons, like the currants in a currant bun.
到20世纪初，大家已经知道，原子是由几个部分构成的——汤姆逊发现电子，就确立了这种见解——但是，大家还不知道的是：到底有多少个部分；它们是怎样合在一起的；它们呈什么形状。有的物理学家认为，原子可能是立方体的，因为立方体可以整齐地叠在一起，不会浪费任何空间。然而，更普遍的看法是，原子更像一块葡萄干面包，或者像一份葡萄干布丁：一个密度很大的固体，带有正电荷，上面布满了带负电荷的电子，就像葡萄干面包上的葡萄干。