What is Ernest Rutherford’s famous Gold Leaf experiment?
In: Physics
To explain it like your five –
People knew that stuff you can touch, called “matter”, was made up tiny things called atoms. and that atoms were made up of even smaller pieces called “protons” and “electrons” etc. But what do atoms actually look like? If you were able to take a picture of atoms, what would you see?
One scientist thought atoms were all physically mixed together like a soup, he called his model “The Plum Pudding Model” because he envisioned a pudding made of electrons with proton/neutron “plums” mixed in. Another scientist created a sort of gun that would shot small particles at a thin film of gold. If the Plum Pudding Model was correct most of the particles would be stopped or reflected by the “electron pudding”. What happened instead was that almost all of the particles just traveled straight through the gold and came out the other side, with a small few bouncing back. This scientist was Ernest Rutherford and his conclusion was that atoms are actually very small things and that the majority of the gold film was just empty space with the atoms very far apart.
ELI5 – The old model of atoms was like a brick wall, when I throw balls at it they bounce back. When Rutherford threw his balls at the “wall” almost all of them went through and so he determined that the wall was actually more like a chain-link fence, full of open holes that things can pass through.
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