They wouldn’t of course. But there is a lot of difference between a computer looking at a billion bubble chamber images and finding one small dislocation of tracks in one set of tracks, showing that one atom of something existed for a millimetre or so at nearly the speed of light; and separating the elements using chemistry, than chromatography, and then measuring the fractions one at a time for decay products as we saw in the film.
When I was in Cambridge in the seventies, they re-opened a lab in the New Cavendish site that had been sealed since the 1920’s, because Lord Rutherford had dropped a tube of radium, or something. These new atoms are definitely getting nippier. But what’s the point in making an element if you can’t put it in a test-tube with some acid, eh?
