Actually, Rutherford's gold foil experiment used alpha particles,
generated by Radon radioactive decay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger%E2%80%93Marsden_experiment
According to http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/alpha.html and
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alpha_decay alpha particles
typically have an energy around 5 MeV which works out to be a velocity
of 5% that of light.
- Joe
On 6/4/2013 6:12 PM, leaking pen wrote:
> I do know that beta particles, used in the famous gold foil
experiments, are .75 c in vacuum, but often faster than c in other
materials.
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 5:26 PM, Roger B <rogerbi...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I confess to being an ignoramus. I confess to having only a B.A.
in psychology, a B.A. in philosophy, and an A.S. in electronics
technology. I am, however, a philosophical savant.
>
> I have a question that I have asked several times but have never
gotten an answer. By what means do conventional physicist probe and
understand the innards of the atom? What is the minimum speed of the
particles that they shoot into the atom to see what is there? Do they
ever use some version of light to understand the innards of the atom?
>
> If, as I suppose, and I could be wrong, all of the particles
"shot" into the atom are traveling close to the speed of light, then
could not there be some unknown characteristic at this speed, perhaps as
yet unknown to us, that causes things inside the atom to behave
differently than from how they would behave if the probing particle were
going much slower. For example, what if the almost light speed particle
had a bow wave in front of it as it flew through the aether? If every
single particle that was used to probe the inside of the atom were
traveling at .99 the speed of light, then this "distortion" would be the
same in every experiment, and one aspect of this limited view inside the
atom we might call the "Coulomb Barrier".
>
> Is this all possible? Or am I off base?
>
>
> Roger Bird
> Colorado
>
