Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The Rutherford Experiment

The first thing we did in class today was check to see if the homecoming genie would come out. Although the class was full of school spirit, the homecoming genie stayed in the lamp. After that we started to go over the notes. Here is a link to the notes: http://www.slideshare.net/gbsliebs2002/atomic-history-day-2-1

After we finished discussing the notes we started a basic simulation of the Rutherford experiment. We had a little ball and we bounced it on a sheet of photo-detector paper that was cover with foil. The little ball represnted an alpha particle, the photo-detector paper represnted where each alpha particle bounced and the foil represented the gold foil from the original Rutherford experiment. Every time the ball hit the paper it would leave a small black dot.

After the simulation we had to calculate the area of the paper (21.5cm.*28.0cm.) then we had to calculate the area of the circles and the area of the small squares inside the circles without measuring anything. Area of a circle formula: pr2. Then we had to find the percent error based on the true area of each circle. The true area of each circle was 50.26

The homework is to finish the Rutherford simulation, finish the pre-lab for the oleic acid lab and 2 assignments on chemthink. the homework is due on friday.

The next scribe will be Connor H.

1 comment:

Mr. Lieberman said...

so how did you do the calcs without measuring the anything?