El experimento de Rutherford en el contexto de la Historia y Filosofía de la Ciencia y sus implicaciones para los textos de Física

This article has evaluated the presentation of Rutherford's experiment in 35 university level general physics textbooks, within a History and Philosophy of Science context. In general the textbooks ignore the importance of rivalry between two conflicting frameworks, as for example Thomson and Rutherford models of the atom (criterion 1). Very few textbooks mention that the crucial argument in favor of the Rutherford model was not the large angle of deflection of alpha particles but rather the finding that only 1 in 20.000 particles deflected through large angles (criterion 2). Again, the textbooks ignore the controversy with respect to Thomson's hypothesis of compound scattering in contrapositlon to Rutherford's hypothesis of single scattering, in order to explain the large angle deflections of alpha particles (criterion 3). Very few textbooks present the work ofThomson and Rutherford in ahistorical context and lack a History and Philosophy of Science perspective