Wednesday, September 30

Sections 4 & 5: Tonight you're going to mess around with a simulation of Rutherford's gold foil experiment. The link to the simulation is below (you may have to allow pop-ups for it to work):
http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/rutherford-scattering

There are two tabs (Rutherford and Plum Pudding), as well as several settings (energy, number of protons, etc). For each tab you will play around with the settings and make some observations. Remember that you can only draw accurate conclusions if you change only one variable at a time. For each tab, fill out a chart in your notebook that looks like this (you should have at least 3 rows of observations for each):

Variable changed	Observation	Possible explanation of the result