Ernest Rutherford, in his famous gold foil experiment, discovered that the atom is mostly empty space with a tiny, dense, positively charged nucleus at its center. His experiment involved bombarding a very thin gold foil with alpha particles and observing their scattering patterns. Most alpha particles passed straight through the foil, indicating that atoms are largely empty space. However, a small number of alpha particles were deflected at large angles, and a very few even bounced back, suggesting the presence of a small, dense, positively charged core within the atom. This led Rutherford to propose the nuclear model of the atom, where the nucleus contains most of the atom's mass and positive charge, surrounded by electrons spread out in the empty space around it
. This discovery overturned the earlier "plum pudding" model, which had envisioned the atom as a diffuse positive charge with embedded electrons. Rutherford's work laid the foundation for the modern understanding of atomic structure.
