Scientists in the field have a picture in their mind.

These particular scientists have engaged a computer programmer to put their mental pictures onto a screen, and they are happy with the results.

As it happens, I did something similar but better. Except molecules not nuclei. The title of my thesis for my Master of Computer Science was "Visualisation in Medicinal Chemistry". That should explain most of it. I read a database containing spatial locations of the atoms in a (pharmaceutical) molecule and I drew them on a screen. Because I used perspective transformation as one of the intermediate mathematical transformations from 3D model coordinates to 2D screen coordinates, I got a pleasant shock when I was doing some stress testing. As part of the ordinary program, I could rotate the molecule on the screen. In stress testing, I held the button down and let the thing rotate as fast as it would go. It jumped off the screen in full-blown 3D!! I will never forget.