Sunday, 12 November 2017

experimental physics - How did Rutherford estimate 1/20000 alpha particles reflected?


As we know in Rutherfords gold foil experiment, Rutherford shot decayed alpha particles into a very thin sheet of gold foil, and after many trials looking into a telescope they observed that about 1 in 20000 alpha particles bounced off this "concentrated, positively charged nucleus' more than 90 degrees. Since they were using the naked eye and with a microscope counting the light beams from the ZnS screen, is this a pure estimate or is there an actual mathematical formula to deduce this number?




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