What if the plum pudding model was correct

In , Ernest Rutherford did an experiment to test the plum pudding model. His two students, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, directed a beam of alpha particles at a very thin gold leaf suspended in a vacuum. The vacuum is important because any deflection of the alpha particles would only be because of collisions with the gold foil and not due to deflections off anything else.

Gold was used because it was the only metal that could be rolled out to be very, very thin without cracking. When the atoms of the gold foil are bombarded by a beam of a particles, only a few alpha -particles In Rutherford's gold foil experiment most of the alpha -particles pass through the gold foil without When alpha - particles are passed through a thin foil, then.

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By the late 19th century, scientists also began to theorize that the atom was made up of more than one fundamental unit. However, most scientists ventured that this unit would be the size of the smallest known atom — hydrogen. By the end of the 19th century, the situation would change drastically.

Sir Joseph John Thomson aka. Thompson was an English physicist and the Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge from onwards. During the s and s, his work largely revolved around developing mathematical models for chemical processes, the transformation of energy in mathematical and theoretical terms, and electromagnetism. This consists of a sealed glass container with two electrodes that are separated by a vacuum.

When voltage is applied across the electrodes, cathode rays are generated which take the form of a glowing patch of gas that stretches to the far end of the tube.

Through experimentation, Thomson observed that these rays could be deflected by electric and magnetic fields. Upon measuring the mass-to-charge ration of these particles, he discovered that they were 1ooo times smaller and times lighter than hydrogen.

This effectively disproved the notion that the hydrogen atom was the smallest unit of matter, and Thompson went further to suggest that atoms were divisible.

To explain the overall charge of the atom, which consisted of both positive and negative charges, Thompson proposed a model whereby the negatively charged corpuscles were distributed in a uniform sea of positive charge.

And from this, the Plum Pudding Model was born, so named because it closely resembled the English desert that consists of plum cake and raisins. Unfortunately, subsequent experiments revealed a number of scientific problems with the model.