Science

From: Aldrin B. Aquino I-Pythagoras To: Mrs. Porras

Introduction: Many philosophers and scientists have contributed in the study of the development of atomic theory. These contributions helped many of the people to discover more about the smallest unit of an element, the atom, making their experiments and discoveries one of the most important contribution in science not only in their era but also nowadays. Imagine how hard it is to study about the smallest particles considering the technology in their era. They are simply amazing!

DEFINITION OF ATOMS Atoms are the smallest unit of an element having a dense central positively charged nucleus surrounded by a system of electrons equal to the number of protons inside the nucleus.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE ATOMIC THEORY

DEMOCRITUS AND THE ULTIMATE PARTICLE CONCEPT (460 BC)

Democritus once asked if how many times you can break a piece of matter until you can no longer break it in half. Then he came up with the idea of the smallest possible bit of matter which he called atomos meaning not able to be divided. Though the idea of Democritus was great at that time, many philosophers disagreed on him; one of them was Aristotle who was the most influential philosophers at that era.

DALTONS ATOMIC THEORY (Early 1800s)

John Dalton, an English chemist experimented with various chemicals to study matter. There he came up showing that matter consists of lumpy particles called atoms. He stated that atoms join to form different substance. His experiment is an important evidence to a more fundamental study even though he was not aware of the specific structure of atoms.

THOMSONS ATOMIC THEORY (1897)

J.J Thomson, an English physicist was the first to discover electrons and developed a model of atom. He came up with the plum pudding model of an atom. In this model, he thought of the pudding as the positively charged material while the plums are the negatively charged materials spread all throughout the positively charged pudding. Thomson tried to prove his argument by conducting a cathode ray experiment.

RUTHERFORDS (1911)

ATOMIC

THEORY

Rutherford conducted experiment to figure out the inside of the atom. From his experiment, he found out that an atom is made up of compact, positively charged nucleus, which is surrounded at a certain distance by negatively charged particles called electrons. It was only in 1919 that Rutherford confirmed the particles of the nucleus as positively charged matter. Using alpha particles as bullets, he knocked the nuclei out of atoms of six elements: boron, fluorine, sodium, aluminum, phosphorus, and nitrogen. He named the resulting particles as protons.

BOHRS ATOMIC THEORY (1912)

Neils Bohr, a Danish physicist developed an idea that there are rules to be followed as to how atoms behave. First rule was that electrons can orbit only at certain allowed distance from the nucleus. Second rule was that atom radiates energy when an electron jumps from higher orbit to a lower orbit. And also atom absorbs energy when electrons get boosted from a low energy to a high energy orbit. Arnold Sommerfeld showed that Bohrs model of atom is not true in all cases and expanded the original Bohrs model to explain the deviation from the study. It was also during this time that English physicist James Chadwick discovered the presence of neutron, a then-unknown particle that has the same mass as the proton. In 1924, Wolfgang Pauli, an Australian physicist, suggested that an electron should spin like a top while it orbits around the nucleus. Pauli also proposed the exclusion principle, which states that no two electrons can have the same set of quantum numbers which agrees on the behavior of the electrons. Also in 1924, a French scientist named Louis de Broglie thought that if light could exist as a wave, then why not particles? In 1926, Erwin Schrodinger thought that if particles could be a wave what the model of atom would look like. The model of Scrodinger was given a symbol psi .

HEISENBERGS UNCERTAINLY PRINCIPLE (1927)

Heisenberg proposed an idea which agreed with the experiments that no experiments can measure the position and the momentum of a particle simultaneously. The idea was called Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, meaning you can only determine the momentum and not the position at a time or vice-versa. Because of this principle, it came up with the model called electron cloud model.