Atomic theory, ancient philosophical speculation that all things can

be accounted for by innumerable combinations of hard, small,

indivisible particles (called atoms) of various sizes but of the same
basic material; or the modern scientific theory of matter according to
which the chemical elements that combine to form the great variety of
substances consist themselves of aggregations of similar subunits
(atoms) possessing nuclear and electron substructure characteristic of
each element. The ancient atomic theory was proposed in the 5th
century BC by the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus and
was revived in the 1st century BC by the Roman philosopher and
poet Lucretius. The modern atomic theory, which has undergone
continuous refinement, began to flourish at the beginning of the 19th
century with the work of the English chemist John Dalton. The
experiments of the British physicist Ernest Rutherford in the early
20th century on the scattering of alpha particles from a thin gold foil
established the Rutherford atomic model of an atom as consisting of a
central, positively charged nucleus containing nearly all the mass and
surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged planetlike electrons.

With the advent of quantum mechanics and the Schrödinger

equation in the 1920s, atomic theory became a precise
mathematical science. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised
a partial differential equation for the quantum dynamics of atomic
electrons, including the electrostatic repulsion of all the negatively
charged electrons from each other and their attraction to the positively
charged nucleus. The equation can be solved exactly for an atom
containing only a single electron (hydrogen), and very close
approximations can be found for atoms containing two or three
electrons (helium and lithium). To the extent that the Schrödinger
equation can be solved for more-complex cases, atomic theory is
capable of predicting from first principles the properties of all atoms
and their interactions. The recent availability of high-
speed supercomputers to solve the Schrödinger equation has made
possible accurate calculations of properties for atoms and molecules
with ever larger numbers of electrons. Precise agreement with
experiment is obtained if small corrections due to the effects of
the theory of special relativity and quantum electrodynamics are also
included.

Atoms
0 Matter is anything that takes up space and has mass. All matter is
made of atoms.
0 Atoms are the basic building blocks of matter. They make up
everything around us; Your desk, the board, your body, everything
is made of atoms!
0 Atoms are too small to see without powerful microscopes.

Modern Atomic Theory

John Dalton
• All matter is made of atoms. Atoms are too small to see,
indivisible and indestructible. All atoms of a given element are
identical.
• It is often referred to as the billiard ball model. He defined
an atom to be a ball-like structure, as the concepts
of atomic nucleus and electrons were unknown at the time.
J.J Thomson
• Discovered the negative electron, and predicted that there also
must be a positive particle to hold the electrons in place.
 • Thomson proposed the plum pudding model of the atom, which
had negatively-charged electrons embedded within a positively-
charged "soup."

Ernest Rutherford
Discovered the nucleus of an atom and named the positive particles in
the nucleus “protons”. Concluded that electrons are scattered in empty
space around the nucleus.
Rutherford's atomic model became known as the nuclear model. In the
nuclear atom, the protons and neutrons, which comprise nearly all of
the mass of the atom, are located in the nucleus at the center of
the atom.
James Chadwick
Discovered that neutrons were also located in the nucleus of an atoms
and that they contain no charge.
This particle became known as the neutron. With the discovery of the
neutron, an adequate model of the atom became available to chemists.
Neils Bohr
• Concluded that electrons are located in planet-like orbits around
the nucleus in certain energy levels.
• In atomic physics, the Bohr model or Rutherford–Bohr model,
presented by Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford in 1913, is a
system consisting of a small, dense nucleus surrounded by
orbiting electrons—similar to the structure of the Solar System,
but with attraction provided by electrostatic forces in place of
gravity.
 The de Broglie‐Bohr model of the hydrogen atom presented here treats the electron as a
particle on a ring with wave‐like properties. de Broglie's hypothesis that matter has wave-
like properties. The consequence of de Broglieʹs hypothesis; an integral number of
wavelengths must fit within the circumference of the orbit.

(Many Scientists!)
The Modern Atomic Theory
Electrons do not orbit the nucleus in neat planet-like orbits but move at
high speeds in an electron cloud around the nucleus.