Which one of these scientists conducted the Gold Foil Experiment which concluded that atoms are mostly made of empty space?

The story behind the answer

Ernest Rutherford is correct. In 1909, Rutherford and his students Geiger and Marsden fired alpha particles at a thin gold foil. Most particles passed straight through, but a few deflected sharply. Rutherford concluded that atoms are mostly empty space with a tiny, dense, positively charged nucleus—overturning J. J. Thomson’s “plum pudding” model.

To place it in context: Thomson discovered the electron; Rutherford discovered the nucleus; Bohr later refined Rutherford’s model with quantized electron orbits. Memory tip: “Rutherford revealed the room in the atom”—nearly all empty space—and “gold foil → gold-standard proof of the nucleus.” Archimedes, much earlier, worked in mathematics and fluid mechanics, not atomic structure.