How Ernest Rutherford overturned the plum pudding model
At the dawn of the 20th century, scientists knew that negatively charged particles existed. Because most atoms have a neutral charge, scientists thought that positive particles might exist to balance the negative particles. They were also curious about how many charged particles were in the atom and how the particles were arranged. Thomson proposed an atomic model in 1904 in response to these curiosities.

In Thomson’s "Plum Pudding Model" each atom was a sphere filled with a positively charged fluid. The fluid was called the "pudding." Scattered in this fluid were electrons known as the "plums." The radius of the model was 10-10 meters.

Thomson suggested that the positive fluid held the negative charges, the electrons, in the atom because of electrical forces. However, this was only a very vague explanation and failed to provide any definite answers.

An early model about the structure of the atom was called the plum pudding model. In this model, the atom was imagined to be a sphere of positive charge with negatively charged electrons dotted around inside it like plums in a pudding. An experiment carried out in 1905 showed that the plum pudding model was wrong.
A scientist called Rutherford designed an experiment to test the plum pudding model. It was carried out by his assistants Geiger and Marsden. A beam of alpha particles was aimed at very thin gold foil and their passage through the foil detected. The scientists expected the alpha particles to pass straight through the foil, but something else also happened.
Some of the alpha particles emerged from the foil at different angles, and some even came straight back. The scientists realised that the positively charged alpha particles were being repelled and deflected by a tiny concentration of positive charge in the atom. As a result of this experiment, the plum pudding model was replaced by the nuclear model of the atom.
After Rutherford's discovery, scientists started to realize that the atom is not ultimately a single particle, but is made up of far smaller subatomic particles. Following research was done to figure