How did scientist in the 1900s discover what was inside atoms?
Okay, first there was JJ thomson. He used a discharge tube to discover that there are negatively charged electrons and positively charged nucleus. Then there was rutherford with his gold foil experiment. He found that you could bombard alpha particles into a gold sheet and most of them would travel through. But some would get bounced back. This concluded that atoms are mostly empty space. I am not sure about the neutrons. I remember there was an experiment where there were particles being shot continously and there was a positive and negative terminal. The terminals attracted the positively and negatively charged particles. But the neutrons just went as if nothing happened.
