As a child I was enthralled by William Henry Bragg's Concerning the Nature of Things, which answers simply the question recently put to me by my granddaughter: "What are atoms and molecules?". Both the author and his son William Lawrence Bragg were in their time resident professor at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London, and both had an unusually well developed ability to communicate with school-children. Their joint Nobel prize, awarded in 1915, was for showing how X-ray diffraction could be used to determine the structure of crystalline substances. It is no coincidence that the title of William Bragg's book is a translation of De rerum natura, in which Lucretius set out his atomic theory of matter. However, Lucretius would have to wait nearly 2,000 years for the Braggs to show that he was right.
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机译：小时候，我被威廉·亨利·布拉格（William Henry Bragg）的《关于事物的本质》着迷，该问题简单地回答了我孙女最近向我提出的一个问题：“原子和分子是什么？”。提交人和他的儿子威廉·劳伦斯·布拉格都是当时在伦敦的英国皇家学会的常驻教授，并且都具有与学童交流的异常发达的能力。他们于1915年获得诺贝尔奖，是因为他们展示了如何使用X射线衍射来确定晶体物质的结构。威廉·布拉格的书的标题是《德·鲁鲁姆·纳图拉》（De rerum natura）的译本绝非偶然，卢克雷修斯在书中阐述了他的原子物质理论。但是，Lucretius将不得不等待近2000年才能让布拉格人证明自己是对的。
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