Ernest rutherford (who was the first person born in new zealand to be awarded the nobel prize in chemistry) demonstrated that nuclei were very small and dense by scattering helium-4 nuclei (4he) from gold-197 nuclei (197au). during this experiment, the energy of the incoming helium nucleus was 8.00 × 10-13 j, and the masses of the helium and gold nuclei were 6.68 × 10-27 kg and 3.29 × 10-25 kg, respectively (note that their mass ratio is 4 to 197).