Who made the observation that there must be very large empty space within the atom ? Einstein Arrhenius Chadwick Rutherford
Rutherford carried out an experiment in which he bombarded a thin sheet of gold foil with alpha particles and then analysed the track of these particles after they collided with the gold foil. In his experiment, Rutherford focused on high-energy alpha particle streams from a radioactive source at a thin sheet of gold (100 nm thickness). He wrapped a fluorescent zinc sulphide screen around the thin gold foil to investigate the deflection generated by the alpha particles. Certain observations obtained by Rutherford contradicted Thomson's atomic hypothesis. Rutherford's observations lead him to the following conclusions: Because a large portion of the -particles fired at the gold sheet passed through it without being deflected, the majority of the space in one atom is vacant. The gold sheet deflected some of the -particles at minor angles, causing the positive charge in each atom to be unevenly distributed. In an atom, the positive charge is concentrated in a relatively small volume. Only a few -particles were deflected back, implying that only a few -particles had almost 180o deflection angles. As a result, the positively charged particles in an atom occupy very little volume in comparison to the entire volume of the atom.
