Reality

Lord Rutherford

It is important to realize everything we see is an illusion.  Nothing is solid.  The heaviest metal is 99.999% empty space, but so is everything else!

How do we know?  In the early part of the 20th century, around 1909, we say as this work took some time.  The investigator was one of England's greatest physical scientists, Earnest Rutherford or Lord Rutherford.  He wanted to know more about the structure of atoms.  Were they solid, like rocks or "BB's" or did they have a structure?

He knew the metal he could work into the thinnest samples was gold that had been beaten between two sheets of parchment to the point it was estimated to be only a few hundred atoms thick as determined by the mass and area of the beaten gold.  

Much other evidence suggested that atoms were very small, on the order of 10 billionths of one centimeter.  Or, as scientists would say ten to the minus eighth centimeter.

Where scientists have to deal in very small and very large numbers they use "scientific notation" where numbers like one million are "one times ten to the sixth," or 1.0 X 10^6 for 1,000,000.  

In this case, where the one is to the right side of the decimal point for 0.00000001 cm we say 1.0 x 10^-8 cm, one times ten to the minus eighth.  And, that was thought to be the size of an atom based on a lot of work so getting a gold sheet down to the thickness of a few hundred of these tiny particles was convenient for what Rutherford wanted to do.

He had participated in much of the early work on radioactive elements and knew radium and thorium emitted radiation, small, high-speed particles that would pass through a gold leaf and make a spot on a plate or film that had been coated with a silver halide precipitate held in place with solidified gelatin, a "photographic plate."

Dr. Rutherford controlled the radiation by putting the radioactive element particle source in the bottom of a hole drilled into a lead block which would absorb all the particles emitted, but those aimed at the small hole.  It was a gun of sub-atomic particles making a very narrow beam.

He did a series of experiments beginning with a single photographic plate and he got strange patterns suggesting some of the radioactive particles were coming through as if nothing were there. But, the density of the deposit on the plate was definitely greater without the gold sheet in place than it was when it was in place when exposed for the same time.  And, there were some deposits at odd angles, as if they had hit something!  Something very hard.  In thinking about it he wondered why some of the particles did not come through at all?  Were they absorbed?  Were they reflected?  Or bounced? 

All of these questions could be answered if he used a long strip of film in a circle around the particle emitting block, or "gun" so he built an apparatus for that and when he ran the experiment he was astounded to see that some of the particles were reflected as if they had hit a hard wall and this was a tissue thin sheet of gold leaf!

Lord Rutherford did the experiment many times and analyzed the data with statistical mathematics to derive a model that would fit the evidence knowing he was going to upset the world with his new model of the atom, the things of which everything is made.  The building blocks of the universe.  The most permanent thing we know.  Atoms are literally forever while everything they form is not, and therein lies a profound message:

When he put it all together Lord Rutherford had compiled data that described the building block of the universe as something that was 99.999% empty space.  

It was ten millionths centimeter in diameter and within it was an infinitely hard particle that was one ten thousandth that size, a trillionth of a centimeter in diameter and containing, by far, most of the mass of the atom while surrounded by a cloud of electrons that filled the space so well we interpret them to be solid, but that is only a trick of our perception   Everything of which we are made is absolutely not as we perceive and think it to be.  99.999% of everything is empty space.

Adrian Vance