Rutherford's Experiment Purpose: The purpose of this experiment is to determine the number of hits made out of 100 rolls. Also to calculate the diameter of a marble without using a ruler to do so.
Hypothesis: I think there will be about 50 hits out of 100 rolls.
Materials: Marbles, round balls (target marbles), round stickers, and meter stick.
Procedure: 1. Obtain 10 target marbles and some marbles. Place the target marbles on the stickers placed on the floor.
2. Have each member of the team randomly roll the bombarding marble at the target marbles. The roller should sit on a chair facing the opposite direction, just to make sure that the roll is random, and roll the marble under the legs of the chair.
3. Each person in the group should takes at least 25 rolls, depending on the amount of people in the group. There should be at least 100 rolls total.
Rutherford Funeral Home
Different glass marbles from a glass-mill PortuguÃ...
Hand-made marbles from West Africa4. When a person is rolling someone else should record the data and set up the target marbles.
Results: Conclusion: My hypothesis was incorrect. There were only 33 hit out of 100. This experiment is very similar to the experiment done by Earnest Rutherford. In his experiment he used the cathode ray to shot beams of light at a thin sheet of foil to see the reaction it would have on the atom. Rutherford expected the beam of light to go straight through because he thought that atom was mostly empty space. But surprisingly occasionally the beams of light would bounce back, proving that an atom is not an just empty space. In this experiment we wanted to see it the bombarding marble, when rolled randomly would hit the target area of go straight through. We saw the sometimes it hit and sometimes it went right through it was purely random and up to chance.
Accepted Value: x = 21.4 = 2.14cm 10 10 Experimental Value: 2 D N = H 20 D = 33 2000 D = 2970 = 1.49 D = 1.49 W R 90 100 2000 2000 % Error = [ 2.14 - 1.49] x 100 = 30.37 2.14
Some historic marbles
English: A Super Micro image of a toy marble.
English: Picture of marbles from my collection