British Sign Language Glossaries of Curriculum Terms

BSL Environmental Science Glossary - Nuclear model of the atom definition

Definition: The Nuclear model of the atom is one of the models that has been used historically to help us get a sense of what an atom might look like. A scientist called Rutherford came up with this model because he didn’t think the Plum Pudding model was quite right. He did an experiment where he bombarded gold foil with Alpha particles - most of these went through the foil. Still, some rebounded, which led Rutherford to conclude that the atom must have a positive centre, called the nucleus, which is positively charged, with a negatively charged electron/s orbiting the nucleus (before we knew about protons and neutrons). Rutherford came up with this model in around 1906.