What is Ernest Rutherford’s famous Gold Leaf experiment?
In: Physics
He shot alpha radiation onto a thin gold foil and noticed it got scattered in all directions.
This disproved Thomsons “plum pudding model” of the atom wich said electrons are swimming inside it like raisins in a positively charged pudding. In this model the alpha particles would only have been deflected by a few degrees are most.
But they got completely scattered, so Rutherford correctly assumed that the electrons must be an outer layer with a heavy core inside.
[Here is a drawing of the conclusion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/Geiger-Marsden_experiment_expectation_and_result.svg/1280px-Geiger-Marsden_experiment_expectation_and_result.svg.png)
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