As part of an experiment with x-rays in 1909, Rutherford was shooting a beam of alpha particles (or alpha rays, emitted by the radioactive element radium) at a sheet of gold foil only 1/3000 of an ...

Rutherford's most groundbreaking work came when he conducted the famous gold-foil experiment in 1909. In collaboration with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, he directed alpha particles at a thin ...

The experiment involved bombarding a thin sheet of gold foil with alpha particles, and earned Rutherford, from Bridgewater on New Zealand's South Island, the moniker the "father of nuclear physics".