SINCE ancient times, many models of the atom have been developed, as the result of people attempting to account for properties of matter they had observed. The model developed by Lord Ernest Rutherford introduced many new ideas about the atom, and even though it is now quite old, many people still see the atom in the way he did.
Rutherford was a former student of J.J. Thomson, but he thought there were inadequacies in Thomson's work. Thomson believed that atoms consisted of small negative charges embedded in a positively charged dough, and so his model is often referred to as the Plum P…