Dennis Whyte

And so what you wanted to see was that as they were going through, the way that they would scatter based on classical, in fact, the Coulomb collision, based on classical mechanics, this will tell me, reveal something

about what the nature of the charge distribution is in matter, because they didn't know.

Like, where the hell is this stuff coming from?

Even though they'd solved electromagnetism, they didn't know, like, what made up charges.

Okay, very interesting.

Through it goes.

And so, what did you set up?

So, it turns out in these experiments, what you did was, because if these so-called alphas, which actually now we know is something else, as they go through, they would deflect.

How much they deflect tells you how strong an electric field they saw.

So you put detectors, because if you put like a piece of glass in front of this, what will happen is that when the alpha particle hits, it literally gives a little boop, a little boop of light like this.

It scintillates, a little blue flash.

So he would train his students or postdocs or whatever the heck they were at the time.

You have to train yourself because you have to put yourself in the dark for like hours to get your eyes adjusted.

And then they would start the experiment and they would sit there and literally count the things.

And they could see this pattern developing, which was revealing about what was going on.

But there was also another part to the experiment, which was that it's like, here's the alphas.

Here's the source.

They're going this way.

They could tell they were going in one direction only, basically.

They're going in this direction.