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I’m in ur atom, probing ur nucleus

// November 19th, 2009 // Tech News

It has been 100 years since the Geiger-Marsden experiment upended humanity’s longstanding view of the atom as a nice, relatively homogeneous particle. When the alpha particles shot at gold foil targets bounced off at odd angles, it shocked everyone involved (the original paper is now open access ). The realization that atoms have a high-mass center lead to the formation of the Rutherford (or planetary) model of the atom, where electrons orbit a dense nucleus.  It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. - E. Rutherford The Rutherford model is now recognized as a useful metaphor, but, as soon as you get into the details, it falls apart. Electrons don’t travel in nice orbits; rather, their orbitals exist as a cloud around the nucleus. The nucleus is not a singular positive mass, but a complex ball of protons and neutrons that are made up of even smaller particles known as quarks and gluons. Although all this information indicates that the Rutherford model is wrong, it doesn’t necessarily indicate what a replacement for the model should look like.