system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Will someone explain in very basic terms the gold foil experiment?

The one that Rutherford did. I have read about it on wikipedia, but I just can't really picture what happened in my mind. An analogy would probably be very helpful. Thanks!
gpt
In early times, smart men knew the existence of atoms. They knew that atoms contained funny things called electrons and protons, and they had a pretty good idea that these 'atoms' were tiny little spheres. The scientists all thought that the electrons and protons were floating randomly around inside the sphere.

You have probably seen mommy make pancakes right? What about chocolate chip pancakes? If you look at the pancake batter with chocolate chips in it, that's what scientists imagined the atom to be like, which the hard chocolate chips representing the protons inside the atom.

Now, scientists can have theories all they want, but a great scientist will test this theory. The very smart scientists thought that if they had a very very thin sheet of metal, and then shot something at it, whatever they shot at it should go right through it. There are some 'hard' parts in the chocolate chip pancake batter, but not enough to stop something flying super fast through it right?

So imagine the scientists set up a big cannon and aimed it at a piece of tissue paper. When the scientists shot the cannon thousands of times they noticed that most of the cannonballs went right through as they thought would happen, but some of the cannon balls hit the tissue paper and bounced back!

How could this be if the atom is just a randomly assorted batter of goo?

The results of this experiments led smart smart men to think that the pancake batter with chocolate chips was wrong! Maybe, for some reason, in the batter all the chocolate chips clump together in the middle forming a very very small, but very dense sphere called the nucleus. The nucleus is so small that most of the cannonballs would miss it, so that most would go through uneffected, but a few would hit that hard center and bounce right back! 

This discovery led the scientists to learn a lot about an atom! It must have a hard center, without those protons floating freely through the sphere!

So from doing something as simple as shooting a cannonball at a piece of paper the scientists learned many things about the atom!