Rutherford Gold Foil Experiment - Backstage | Science

Chosen because gold is incredibly malleable and can be beaten into a sheet only about 1,000 atoms thick.

While most did pass through, Rutherford was shocked to find that: Rutherford Gold Foil Experiment - Backstage Science

To look inside the atom, Rutherford needed to fire something at it. He used: Chosen because gold is incredibly malleable and can

At the time, scientists believed in the , where an atom was a blob of positive charge with electrons scattered inside like fruit in a pudding. If this were true, the heavy alpha particles should have whizzed straight through the "soft" atoms. scientists believed in the

In 1911, Ernest Rutherford and his team (Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden) conducted the "Gold Foil" experiment, which Backstage Science describes as essentially the .