Thought process behind Rutherford's gold foil experiment In Rutherford's gold foil experiment, if he at first thought the atom looked like the plum pudding (as Thomson had said), why did he think the alpha particles would not be repelled by the positive "pudding" and that they would go straight through?  Is it because of the high energy of the emission of the alpha particles?
Rutherford conducted his gold foil in order to prove Thomson's plum pudding model but the result was contradicting.
He expected that most of the Alpha particle will show very minor deflections  because the positive charge was evenly spread throughout the atom according to the plum pudding model.