Rutherford Gold Foil Experiment - Backstage Science May 2026

Positively charged particles emitted from a radioactive source (radium).

To look inside the atom, Rutherford needed to fire something at it. He used: Rutherford Gold Foil Experiment - Backstage Science

A detector that would flash when hit by an alpha particle. The Unexpected Result The Unexpected Result Chosen because gold is incredibly

Chosen because gold is incredibly malleable and can be beaten into a sheet only about 1,000 atoms thick. Videos about some of Britain's most amazing science

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.

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