Posts tagged with "Neutrons":

Rutherford Scattering

Let's begin with a journey through time (and space, if you live any distance from Cambridge). The year is 1909, nearly seventy years since the death of John Dalton, the physicist who pioneered atomic theory. It's a little over ten years since Sir Joseph John Thomson (J.J. Thomson—not to be confused with the other J.J. Thomson, who was a philosopher) discovered the electron, and created the "plum pudding" model of an atom. This model stated that atoms were a more or less homogeneous mix of positively-charged and negatively-charged particles (protons and neutrons respectively). Electrons were the negatively-charged ones, because Ben Franklin said so in the eighteenth century (simplification, and possibly slightly farcical). Atoms were more of less the coolest kid in town when it came to physics, but scientists still didn't really know all that much about them—the "plum-pudding" model was mostly a wild guess.

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