How did Rutherford change Thomson's model of the atom?

Answer 1

At the time of Rutherford's experiment, there were competing ideas of the internal structure of atoms. One idea was the "plum pudding" model where the positive and negative charges of the atom were all mixed up together. The idea that Rutherford had was that all of the positive charge and most of the mass was concentrated at the center of an atom in a region that was its "nucleus."

Rutherford hypothesized that more alpha particles would be deflected if the positive charge and mass of the atom was more spread out, occupying a large part of the volume of the atom.The "plum pudding" model was not the only idea that had been offered for the internal structure of the atom, but none had hypothesized an extremely tiny nucleus with all of the positive charge and virtually all of the Atomic Mass and so none were consistent with his result that relatively few alpha particles were deflected and those that were deflected were deflected a great deal. It did not take long to do the theoretical calculations to show that the experimental results were consistent with a point-like nucleus of positive charge exerting a coulomb (inverse square of distance) force.

The result in now called the Rutherford model of the atom and the type of scattering observed is called Rutherford scattering.

Answer 2

Rutherfords experiment proved the existence of a nucleus as some alpha particles "bounced back" from the gold foil sample . Thomson model did not involve a nucleus and predicted just a slight deflection or none at all.

Answer 3

Rutherford conducted the Gold Foil experiment, where he shot alpha rays at a piece of gold. This caused very few of the particles to bounce back, when most of the went through it. This proved that there was a nucleus, which the particles were bouncing off of, and the rest was empty space.