It was around 440 BCE,that Democritus first proposed,

that everything in the world was made up of tiny particles,

surrounded by empty space, and he even speculated, that

they vary in size and shape, depending on the substance

they composed. He called this particles “atomos” Greek for

indivisible. His ideas were opposed by the more popular

philosopher of his day. Aristotle, for instance disagreed

completely, stating instead that matter was made of four

elements; earth, air, water and fire, and most later scientist

followed suit.

Atoms would remain all but forgotten until 1808, when a

Quaker teacher named John Dalton sought to challenge

Aristotelian theory. Whereas Democritus’s atomism had

been purely theoretical, Dalton showed that common

substances always broke down into the same elements in

the same proportions. He concluded that the various

compounds where combination of atoms of different

elements, each of a particular size and mass, that could

neither be created nor destroyed. Though he received many

honor of his works, as a Quaker Dalton lived modestly until

the end of his days.

Atomic theory was now accepted by the scientific

community but the next major advancement would not

come until nearly a century later with the physicist J.J

Thompson’s 1897 discovery of the electron. In what we

might call the chocolate chip cookie model of the atom, he

showed atoms as uniformly packed spheres of positive

matter filled with negatively charged electrons. Thomson

won a Nobel Prize in 1906 for his electron discovery but his

model of the atom didn’t stick around long.

This was because he happened to have pretty smart

students, including a certain Ernest Rutherford, who would

become known as the father of the nuclear age. While

studying the effects of X-rays on gases Rutherford decided

to investigate atoms more closely by shooting small

positively charged alpha particles at a sheet of gold foil.

Under Thomson’s model, the atoms thinly dispersed

positively charged would not be enough to deflect the

particles in any one place. The effect would have been like

a bunch of tennis ball punching through a thin paper

screen. But while most of the particles did pass through,

some bounced right back, suggesting that the foil was more

like a thick net with a very large mesh.

Rutherford concluded that atoms consisted largely of

empty space with just a few electrons while most of the

mass was concentrated in the center which he termed the

nucleus. The alpha particles passed through the gaps but

bounced back from the dense, positively charged nucleus.

But the atomic theory wasn’t complete just yet.

In 1913, another of Thomson’s students by the name of

Niels Bohr expanded on Rutherford’s nuclear model.

Drawing on earlier by Max Planck and Albert Einstein, he

stipulated that electrons orbit the nucleus at fixed energies

and distances, able to jump from one level to another but

not to exist in the space between. Bohr’s planetary model

took center stage, but soon, it too encountered some

complications. Experiments had shown that rather than

simply being discrete particles, electrons simultaneously

behave like waves not being confined to a particular point

in space.

And in formulating his famous uncertainty principle,

Werner Heisenberg showed it was impossible to determine

both the exact position and speed of electrons as they move

around an atom.
And in 1932, James Chadwick proved the existence of

neutron and how they play a key part in nuclear fission of

atoms.

The idea that electrons cannot be pinpointed but exist

within a range of possible locations gave rise to the current

quantum model of the atom, a fascinating theory with a

whole new set of complexities whose implications have yet

to be fully grasped.