How Rutherford Proved That Atoms Are Mostly Empty Space – Hackaday

By the beginning of the 20th century scientists were only just beginning to probe the mysteries of the atomic world, with the exact nature of these atoms subject to a lot of speculation and theory. Recently [The Action Lab] on YouTube replicated one of the most famous experiments performed at the time, commonly known as Rutherford’s gold-foil experiment.A part of Rutherford’s scattering experiments, this particular experiment involved shooting alpha particles at a piece of gold foil with the source, foil, and detector placed in a vacuum vessel. Rutherford’s theoretical model of the atom that he developed over the course of these experiments differed from the contemporary Thomson model in that Rutherford’s model postulated that atoms consisted of a single large charged nucleus at the core of the atom, with the electrons spread around it.As can be seen in the video, the relatively large alpha particles from the Americium-241 source, available from many smoke detectors, will most of the time zip right through the foil, while suffering a pretty major deflection in other times when a nucleus is hit. This is consistent with Rutherford’s model of a small nucleus surrounded by what is effectively mostly just empty space.While Rutherford used a screen that would light up when hit with alpha particles, this experiment with a Geiger counter is an easy way to replicate the experiment, assuming that you have access to a large enough vacuum chamber.When a guy is 11-12 orders of magnitude out when he states a number (“10 to the 26th atoms in this bead”), and doesn’t instantly realize it’s unreasonable, it’s hard to trust the rest of what he says or shows…Yeah, I haven’t been particularly impressed with this Action Lab guy over the years. As far as I can tell, he’s a layman that inexplicably has access to some high-end lab equipment.Why would he be 11-12 numbers of magnitude out?
Say that bead weighs 1 gram. It would be 4 mmol of Americium.
So that would be 0.004 * 6.023 * 10 to the 26th = 2,47 * 10 to the 21th.
That’s five orders of magnitude out. Still a lot, but it doesn’t discredit the rest of the video in any way.The guy has a degree in chemical engineering. If he doesn’t have an instant gut feel for what 10^26 atoms (=166 moles) is, his degree is worthless, and so is his credibility as a science presenter. To save you the arithmetic, 166 moles of Am-241 would mass around 166 * 241 (/1000)= 40 kg.The legal maximum amount of Am-241 in a smoke detector is 1 uCi = 37 kBq, (which is consistent with the 4 k cpm he’s measuring, given solid angle and sensitivity). With the 432 year half life, that’s ~10^15 atoms, maximum.I don’t have these gut feelings about the count of atoms and I’m really worried about my degreesAre you a youtube content creator pretending to know something about science? A teacher of science? Is your degree in chemistry, physics, materials, or biology? If no, then you might be excused for forgetting basic high school science concepts like what a mole is.There is a lot of that going around:Don’t recall the dudes name. ‘Dipshit explains everything.’
Listen for 5 minutes and it’s obvious he understands nothing.‘Not just bikes’
His thesis is that the whole world should be Amsterdam and is stupid for not being Amsterdam already.The internet needs an official ball kicker.
Someone who goes around and kicks idiot internet personalities square in the balls/pussy.
I’d subscribe the that YouTube channel.You mean like these guys ? lolhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBWbpTJRqkmaybe apocryphal or whatever that fancy word is but I think he said something like it was like shooting a machine gun at tissue paper and having the bullets come back at you. Something like that.Huh. Reply fail. Meant as independent comment but while I’m here. Would 100% subscribe to ball kicking channel.As seen in IdiocracyI don’t watch his channel because I just can’t stand the guy. His voice is terrible and he seems to have zero presentation skills, it’s like a monotone monologue.6.023 X 10^23“while suffering a pretty major deflection in other times when a nucleus is hit. This is consistent with Rutherford’s model of a small nucleus surrounded by what is effectively mostly just empty space.”No, that’s not what Rutherford’s scattering model said. It’s not a case where “most of the time you pass straight through, sometimes you go ‘bang’ and bounce backwards.”Rutherford scattering peaks at 0 degrees, and falls off smoothly but never reaches zero even at 180 degrees. In other words most of the time when it interacts with the nucleus, it’s still just a small deflection. This is because even though the nucleus is small, it’s still positively charged. So you still get interactions even if the alpha particle zips far away from the nucleus.In fact in Rutherford’s experiments, the alpha particle never actually “hits” the nucleus, because even if the particle is heading square on to the nucleus… you’ve still got a positive charge repelling a positive charge, and that alpha particle does not have enough energy to actually get to the nucleus (if it did, uh, you need a bigger bunker to do that experiment). That’s why Rutherford’s “minimum distance” was way bigger than a gold atom’s nucleus.The main reason for Rutherford’s experiment really was because Thomson’s model for nuclear scattering required multiple scattering events: hence the reason Rutherford used thin gold foil.Grad students were detectorsThe “empty space” hypothesis is not considered correct anymore. Even Quantum theory disagrees, see e.g.:
https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-empty-atom-picture-misunderstands-quantum-theoryIf you get into some decent theories that actually provide an explanation for many of the “unresolved” issues of chemistry and physics, like those of Miles Mathis, then you also have an idea what is filling the “emptiness” – a huge number of much smaller particles; ones that are to an electron what an electron is to us in terms of size, flying around at c. Through collision and spin these particles then build up into everything we can measure, providing a classical model of the Universe that has also been predictive, and does not require the infinite number of fudges, dimensions and magic numbers that QM does.On another tack, is the element’s name pronounced amerissium or americkium?Hmmm… here (western europe) we tend to say “amuhreet-sium”?Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
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Source: https://hackaday.com/2025/02/23/how-rutherford-proved-that-atoms-are-mostly-empty-space/