Laypeople use more scientific-sounding words, sure, but what more scientific way is there to understand something than to have discovered it yourself through experiment?
Franklin did not understand electricity, but merely observed it.
It wasn't until we discovered the electron proper and Maxwell did his work that we-- anyone-- understood electricity.
Understanding comes from scientific and academic rigor after the discovery.
I’d even say that we don’t yet fully understand the electron!
It's fun to think about a time when this stuff that we now take for granted as basic physics was not just new and poorly understood, but the forefront of knowledge was advancing so rapidly.
I haven't been able to find an online copy of the 1931 edition, but the 1937 edition is called Structure of Atomic Nuclei and Nuclear Transformations, and it's available through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501245
It's just that our most recent theories have been so rich that we have happened to discover many things theoretically before we find them in real life. (Theory has preceded practice in recent decades, rather than the other way around which is historically more common.) I'm not sure this will always be so, it might be a temporary leap.
