Gold Foil Lab Report

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The lab we completed and the gold foil experiment are very similar in the ideas and ways that they worked. In the gold foil experiment the alpha-particle emitter would send a laser to bounce off a piece of gold foil which would cause some of the particles to be reflected and shown on the detecting screen. This is similar to the activity we completed because when we dropped the marble on the paper it acted as the laser, when the marble hit the carbon paper it was deflected onto the piece of circle paper underneath the carbon sheet. This activity and experiment contrasted because in the activity we completed there is not a similar size between the circles and the atoms. Atoms are the smallest unit of matter meaning that they are very hard to actually see, while in the …show more content…

After reading the given information about Rutherford’s experiment, I believe that Rutherford inferred that the nucleus was very small. This was shown when only 1 of 8000 alpha particles were able to be deflected onto the nucleus. The marks in the experiment that would represent the deflected particles would be the marks located within the circles. With the circles being small and not large it was harder for the marks to be made in the circle which would represent how difficult it was for many particles to be deflected as well. The percentage of our deflected particles was 15% which compares to Rutherford’s 0.01% of deflected particles. Although the numbers are not relatively close, they are reasonable because of the precision and way that we calculated the deflected particles compared to how Rutherford did. If this activity were to better represent the gold foil experiment, the circles of the sheet would have to be much smaller. In order to

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