Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand physicist, conducted the gold foil experiment and discovered that the atom has a positively charged nucleus.
In 1911, he conducted an experiment in which he fired alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold foil. The majority of the particles went straight through the gold foil, but a small percentage of the particles bounced back. He discovered that the bouncing back was caused by a small, positively charged nucleus at the center of the atom. Rutherford's experiment was crucial to our understanding of the structure of the atom. Prior to his experiment, the prevailing model of the atom was that it was a solid, indivisible sphere.
However, Rutherford's experiment showed that the atom was mostly empty space, with a positively charged nucleus at its center. This discovery paved the way for future research into atomic structure and helped to lay the foundation for the development of nuclear physics.
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