Indexing the archive…
Your Universe of Digital Possibilities
Thomson’s atom: positive charge spread like a pudding, electrons set in it like plums. It predicts alpha particles pass nearly straight through gold foil — and they do. Fire thousands, swing the microscope, watch the pudding fit every count. Then look behind the foil.
A charge smeared through a sphere of radius R can only nudge a fast, heavy alpha — about a hundredth of a degree per atom — and a foil’s N random nudges add to a Gaussian cone a few degrees wide. Past 90° it allows, in effect, nothing.
A point charge deflects an alpha along a hyperbola, and the rate of large deflections falls as 1/sin⁴(θ/2) — rare but never zero. The counted fraction past 90° fixes how close the alpha came, and so how small the charge must be.
The pudding made a correct forward prediction and was refuted by the events it declared impossible. Most alphas barely deflect — the atom is mostly nothing, as Thomson said; the rare back-scatters demand a dense point the smear cannot supply. The Void counts particles through matter the same way, and The Phase rebuilds a crystal from what it scatters. In the edition, The Null convicted by an absence; this one by a presence the theory forbade.