Yesterday was a very eventful day in Period 6 chemistry! We began class by once again summoning the homecoming genie (he didn't show up). Shortly after, we began with some notes on Ernest Rutherford.A student of J.J. Thomson, Rutherford started noticing that "alpha" particles were sometimes deflected by something in the air, and he couldn't figure out why. So he began his gold-foil experiments. He fired alpha particles at an extremely thin sheet of gold foil, and discovered that they were deflected through large angles and could even be reflected strait back at the source. This showed that most of the atom was empty, and there was a dense positive area in the atom (the nucleus).
After the notes, we took part in an interesting Rutherford Simulation modeled after the experiments Rutherford did when he discovered the nucleus. We got into groups of two and received papers, marbles, and carbon paper. Each sheet of paper had six cirlces on it with a tiny square in the center of each circle. We laid a peice of carbon paper (face down) on top of this sheet and dropped a marble on the paper about 200 times. This left each group with a sheet with 200 black dots scattered throughout the circles, squares, and outside edges.
We were challenged to use this sheet (and the dots that marked it) it estimate measurements for the areas of the circles and squares. The correct way to do this was to do
(% dots in circles) x 602 cm^2=area of 6 circles, and the same for squares, just replacing the percentages.
The nights homework was to work on this expirement for Friday, Oleic Acid Prelab, and the Chemthink.
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