![The Rutherford gold-foil experiment[Credits : Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]](http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/75/22475-004-A3C9BDB8.gif)
In 1911 physicist Ernest Rutherford disproved William Thomson’s model of the atom as a uniformly distributed substance. Because a few of the alpha particles in his beam were scattered by large angles after striking the gold foil, Rutherford knew that the gold atom’s mass must be concentrated in a tiny, dense nucleus.
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