Question

Why did Rutherford say that bombarding atoms with particles was like “playing with marbles”? What subatomic particle did Rutherford discover during this phase of his work?

Answer 1

Ernest Rutherford's discovery was associated to "playing with marble" because it was like hitting a group of marbles and displacing it with the use of a single marble.During his experimentation he bombarded a nitrogen gas with alpha particles and found that occasionally another element, which was oxygen, was produced. He concluded that the alpha particle must have ejected a positively charged particle, which he named PROTON- the subatomic particle he had incidentally discovered.