Describe Ernest Rutherford's Gold Foil experiment?

Answer 1

You see...the gold foil experiment was basically when alpha particles He 2+ ions were fired into a thin sheet of gold foil..It was done by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden( students of Rutherford)..Now basically the model of atom then was that what is called the"plum model" or "apple pie model"..or whatever you wish to call it..the basic idea of course was that positive charge was spread around the atom with electrons embedded in them.Now,of course the spread out positive charge,could not deflect the doubly charged alpha particles by much..why?because the positive charges are all spread apart and the field they set up would gradually weaken with distance and hence the total field strength at a given point would not be large enough to deflect the particle.So,they obviously expected small deflections ,but ahat they found amazed them..some of the particles actually was reflected by more than 90 degrees and most of them passed through.."It was like firing a 15-inch long shell in a piece of tissue paper and it came back to hit you"..so now what could this mean?Rutherford concluded that since the particles reflected back,there must be a strong positive"nucleus"..and since most of the particles passed right through,most of the space in an atom must be empty..I think that's about it!!