Right. I was pretty surprised and amused when I was learning nuclear chemistry and realized: an alpha particle is also a helium-4 nuclei, a beta particle is an electron/positron, and a gamma ray is just high energy electromagnetic radiation.
This is sort of because the discoveries were made before people were really aware of helium nuclei, electrons/positrons, or high energy EM, they just ran physical experiments in a lab and saw there were different kinds of radiation that had different physical properties, and under close inspection of those properties, the nature of the radiation was deduced.
This is sort of because the discoveries were made before people were really aware of helium nuclei, electrons/positrons, or high energy EM, they just ran physical experiments in a lab and saw there were different kinds of radiation that had different physical properties, and under close inspection of those properties, the nature of the radiation was deduced.