Exercise 8.6
If you could ask Rutherford one question about his work, what would it be?
Not cross-checked
NCERT prints no numerical answer for this exercise, so this working has not been cross-checked against the book.
This asks for your own question, so there is no single answer — but the chapter tells you where the good questions are.
"Why did you take the few α-particles that bounced back seriously, instead of writing them off as experimental error?" — they were rare, yet they carried the entire discovery.
"How did you decide the nucleus is positively charged, rather than merely small and heavy?"
"You found the nucleus to be about \(\displaystyle 10^{5}\) times smaller than the atom — what convinced you that the atom really is that empty?"
"Your model could not explain why atoms are stable. Did you already know this when you proposed it in $\displaystyle 1911$?"
"Why did you have Geiger and Marsden fire the particles at gold foil in particular?"
A strong question points either at something the chapter says his model could not explain, or at how he read evidence that others might have discarded.