that he had spotted alpha particles being strongly deflected, Rutherford was astounded. In a lecture Rutherford delivered at Cambridge University, he said: 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. 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. See also Atomic theory Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy Rutherford scattering List of scattering experiments References Bibliography External links Description of the experiment, from cambridgephysics.org Foundational quantum physics Physics experiments 1909 in science Ernest Rutherford Fixed-target experiments