Ernest Rutherford Information

Ernest Rutherford (1908) an English physicist bombarded a thin sheet of gold foil with alpha particles, expecting most of the particles to pass through unaffected and a few being deflected by their interaction with the negatively charged particles. However, much to his amazement, he discovered that some of the particles bounced back. He concluded that an atom must be mostly empty space with a small dense positively charged particle in the center surrounded by negatively charged electrons. This made Rutherford the first to observe protons.

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Updated August 11, 2005 by: Glen Westbroek

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