ABSTRACT
For a period of time the theoretical and experimental situation was in a state of confusion. Quarks have never been isolated as free particles, so it is generally thought that they are always confined to hadronic bound states. Dozens of hadrons are formed, and the resultant state is a mess. Rutherford’s experiment scattering alpha particles off of gold atoms demonstrated that the charge of an atom is concentrated in its nucleus. It provided firm evidence that the Thomson model – in which positive and negative charges were uniformly distributed throughout the atom – was not correct, paving the way for the Bohr model and, ultimately, our current understanding of the atom. In an inelastic scattering process, the particles in the final state are not the same as in the initial state.
