|Allen Pei and Syed Sadat Nazrul|
If you successfully toss a ping pong ball into one of the holes, you are referencing the times when positively charged alpha particles passed by the atomic nuclei in the very thin sheet of gold foil they were shot at. When your ping pong ball hits gold foil and bounces back, that represents the times that positive particles encountered an atom and bounced back. If I played long enough, I probably even might have even grazed the edge of one of the holes – recreating instances in which the positive particles passed through the foil, but had their trajectory changed by atomic nuclei.
Rutherford’s Experiment is also known at the Geiger-Marsden experiment or Gold foil experiment.