Large Hadron Collider

The gold foil thing should be done to see if any odd angles are observed with modern equipment. I never liked the assumptions made when this was done in 1910.

Jim, Rutherford's Gold foil experiment has been recreated 1000's of times and the results are the same. Remember in the scientific method that results should be reproduceable, they are in this case. Not all regular science is bad.

Mark Vitrone

I think everyone remembers Rutherford's description of it as being like a 15" shell bouncing off a tissue. It is. At the point of impact we have a force of about 50 Newtons acting on the alpha particle. [8D] That's an acceleration of about 2.5 times ten to the power 19 c [] Our alpha particle survives this cruel treatment and is as good as new when it's detected.

Here's a new scientific term, the sqiudgigoogle, the amount of squidging that an alpha particle can take in its journey through life. []

(Edited) Maybe, the gold transmutes into, I don't know, an isotope of bismuth say. Then kicks out a new alpha particle. The old one being repaired inside the nucleus, so that it can jump back to being that wonderful substance we all know and love, gold

Just thinking aloud about this. The smaller the radius of the gold nucleus, the better we know the positions of its protons and neutrons. We know the velocity of the alpha particles, about one tenth the speed of light.

So, two theories, one in which the angle of bounce off is due to the beam being off target by fractions of the nucleus radius, the other being the quantum uncertainty of the alpha particle's momentum when its extremely close to the gold nucleus. In effect what we have at that point is degenerate matter, neutron star stuff on a tiny scale.

Trying the experiment with a very thin layer of bismuth might be worth doing. That metal is bonded to another metal (tellurium?) in truck fridges, something called the Peltier effect. Which in turn has something to do with the Hall effect in bismuth. We could measure these two effects, on a thin bimetal layer under alpha particle bombardment. To see whether we have a bounce off, or an actual entry into the nucleus and a transmutation. Obviously that would be radioactive.

(Edited) You know, I looked in a couple of old school text books for details of the experiment and both said the same thing about it. They were after the gosh wow factor, to interest bright school kids. Take a kilo block and then stand something about the weight of the sun on top of it. Note they say weight not mass, because there is an acceleration involved. How often have we read about a teaspoon full of neutron star "weighing" millions of tonnes? Of course they missed a trick by not saying that it's the acceleration that is huge, much faster than light.

If I worked for a company that made truck/lorry refrigerators, I'd want to make a very thin thermopile from bismuth and the other metal, in an I beam coater. This for r & d purposes. So there's a good chance that such a film exists someplace.

If particles have been smashed billions of times what is there to learn from this new machine? The results are always the same so what is the logic in doing it all over again?

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Jim</i>
<br />If particles have been smashed billions of times what is there to learn from this new machine? The results are always the same so what is the logic in doing it all over again?
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

You hit the nail on the head, Jim.

Gregg Wilson