🎉 Fun Fact: Imagine shooting a big cannonball at a tissue paper, and it bounces back! Sounds bonkers? That’s how Rutherford felt with his experiment.

• What? Experiment studying the scattering of alpha particles on a thin gold foil.
• Who? Conducted by Ernest Rutherford, Johannes Geiger, and Ernest Marsden.

• Expectation: Alpha particles slightly deflected due to atoms (based on Thomson’s plum-pudding model).
• Surprise! About 1 in 8000 alpha particles bounced back!

🍩 The Doughnut Analogy: Imagine shooting tiny BBs at a massive doughnut and they bounce back! The doughnut's jam center represents the atom's core.

• What is it? A positively charged helium nucleus represented as 4 He²⁺.
• Like little bullets, some of these bullets bounce back, suggesting they hit something dense.

• Atoms have a tiny, dense center (nucleus) holding most of the atom's mass.
• This nucleus carries a positive charge.
• Key Discovery: Atoms are mostly empty space.

🌌 Space Analogy: If an atom was a giant stadium, its nucleus would be a tiny pea in the center.

• Over 100,000 scintillations (light flashes) were observed.
• It required someone to sit in the dark and count these tiny light flashes, a task Geiger excelled at.
• Inspired by this, Geiger developed the famous "Geiger counter" for radiation detection.