Models of the Atom

Michael Fowler

University of Virginia

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Early String Theory

The first attempt to construct a physical model of an atom was made by William
Thomson (later elevated to Lord Kelvin) in 1867. The most striking property of the atom
was its permanence. It was difficult to imagine any small solid entity that could not be
broken, given the right force, temperature or chemical reaction. In contemplating what
kinds of physical systems exhibited permanence, Thomson was inspired by a paper
Helmholtz had written in 1858 on vortices. This work had been translated into English by
a Scotsman, Peter Tait, who showed Thomson some ingenious experiments with smoke
rings to illustrate Helmholtz' ideas. The main point was that in an ideal fluid, a vortex
line is always composed of the same particles, it remains unbroken, so it is ring-like.
Vortices can also form interesting combinations -- A good demonstration is provided by
creating two vortex rings one right after the other going in the same direction. They can
trap each other, each going through the other in succession. This is probably what Tait
showed Thomson, and it gave Thomson the idea that atoms might somehow be vortices
in the ether.

Of course, in a non ideal fluid like air, the vortices dissipate after a while, so Helholtz'
mathematical theorem about their permanence is only approximate. But Thomson was
excited because the ether was thought an ideal fluid, so vortices in the ether might last
forever! This was very aesthetically appealing to everybody - "Kirchhoff, a man of cold
temperament, can be roused to enthusiasm when speaking of it." (Pais, IB page 177,
source for this material). In fact, the investigations of vortices, trying to match their
properties with those of atoms, led to a much better understanding of the hydrodynamics
of vortices - the constancy of the circulation around a vortex, for example, is known as
Kelvin's law. In 1882 another Thomson, J. J., won a prize for an essay on vortex atoms,
and how they might interact chemically. After that, though, interest began to wane -
Kelvin himself began to doubt that his model really had much to do with atoms, and
when the electron was discovered by J. J. in 1897, and was clearly a component of all
atoms, different kinds of non-vortex atomic models evolved.

It is fascinating to note that the most exciting theory of fundamental particles at the
present time, string theory, has a definite resemblance to Thomson's vortex atoms. One of
the basic entities is the closed string, a little loop, which has fields flowing around it
reminiscent of the swirl of ethereal fluid in Thomson's atom. And it's a very beautiful
theory - Kirchhoff would have been enthusiastic!
Floating Magnets

In 1878, Alfred Mayer, at the University of Maryland, dreamed up a neat demonstration

of how he imagined atoms might be arranged in molecules. He took a few equally
magnetized needles and stuck them through corks so that they would float with their
north poles all at the same height above the water, all repelling each other equally. He
then held the south pole of a more powerful magnet some distance above the water, to
attract the needles towards this central point. The idea was to see what equilibrium
patterns the needles would form for different numbers of needles. He found something
remarkable - the needles liked to arrange themselves in shells. Three to five magnets just
formed a triangle, square and pentagon in succession. but for six magnets, one went to the
center and the others formed a pentagon. For more magnets, an outer shell began to form.

Kelvin's immediate response to Mayer's publication was that this should give some clues
about the vortex atom. Apparently it didn't, but twenty-five years later it guided his
thinking on a new model.

Plum Pudding

Kelvin, in 1903, proposed that the atom have the newly discovered electrons embedded
somehow in a sphere of uniform positive charge, this sphere being the full size of the
atom. (Of course, the sphere itself must be held together by unknown non-electrical
forces - which is still true of the positive charge in our modern model of the atom.) This
picture was taken up by J. J. Thomson too, and was dubbed the plum pudding model,
after traditional English Christmas fare, a large round pudding (rich with suet) with
raisins embedded in it. In 1906, J. J. concluded from an analysis of the scattering of X-
rays by gases and of absorption of beta-rays by solids, both of which he assumed were
effected by electrons, that the number of electrons in an atom was approximately equal to
the atomic number. This led to a picture of electron arrangements in an atom reminiscent
of Mayer's magnets. Perhaps by analyzing possible modes of vibration of electrons in
these configurations, the spectra could be calculated.

The simplest case to consider was clearly hydrogen, now assumed (correctly) to contain
just one electron.

How does an atom's color depend on its size?

By "color" we mean here the spectral colors emitted when the atom is excited. In
Thomson's plum pudding model, there is a clear relationship between the size of the
pudding and the frequency at which the electron will oscillate, and hence presumably
radiate, when excited. The two are related because the assumption is that the total
positive charge - which is uniformly spread throughout the sphere -- is just equal to the
electron's negative charge. At rest in its lowest state, the electron just sits in the middle of
this sphere of charge. When bumped somehow, it will oscillate about that point. If the
electron is at distance x from the center, it will feel a restoring force towards the center
equal to the attraction from that part of the positive charge it is "outside" of - that is, the
charge within a sphere of radius x about the center. Therefore, the larger the whole atom
-- the pudding - the more thinly spread the positive charge is, and the smaller the amount
of charge within the small sphere of radius x that is attracting the electron back towards
the center. So, the bigger the atom is, the slower the electron's oscillation is, and the
lower frequency the radiation emitted.

It is straightforward to give a quantitative estimate of the size of the atom based on the
observation that when excited it emits radiation in the visible range.

Let us assume that the positively charged sphere has radius r0 (this is then the size of the
atom, which we know is about 10-10 meters).

If the electron is displaced from the center of the atom in the x-direction an amount x, it is
attracted back by all the charge that is now closer to the center than itself, that is, an
amount of charge equal to ex3/r03. (Recall e is the total amount of charge on the sphere,
and x3/r03 is the fraction of the sphere closer to the center than x.) This charge acts as if it
were a point charge at the origin, so the inverse-square law gives a 1/x2 factor, and the
equation of motion for the electron is therefore:

Provided it stays within the sphere, the electron will execute simple harmonic motion
with a frequency

Notice that, as we discussed above, as the size of the atom increases the frequency goes
down. And we know the frequency, at least approximately --it corresponds to visible
light. Therefore, this model will predict a size of the atom, which we can compare with
the size from other predictions, such as Brownian motion (plus the assumption that in a
liquid, the atoms are fairly close packed - they take up most of the room available).

If we take visible light, say with a frequency 4.1015 radians per second, we find r0 must be
about 2.10-10 meters, a little on the large side, but encouragingly close to the right answer
for a first attempt.

Sad to report, though, no real progress was made beyond this in predicting spectra using
Thomson's pudding. Many attempts were made to find stable arrangements of electrons
in atoms, not just hydrogen, using models like Mayer's magnets, and also having the
electrons going around in circles. It was hoped that if certain numbers of magnets formed
a very stable arrangement, that might model a chemically nonreactive atom, etc. - but
nobody succeeded in making any real predictions along these lines, the models could not
be connected with the properties of real atoms.

Evidently, then, the theorists were stuck - and the experimental challenge was to find
some way to look inside an atom, and see how the electrons were arranged. This is what
Rutherford did, as we shall discuss in the next lecture. He was very surprised by what he
saw.

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