G8: Atomic Museum: Atomic Theory

In the fifth century BC, Leucippus and Democritus argued that all matter was composed of small, finite particles that they called atomos

The history of atomic theory began as a philosophical concept in ancient India and Greece.

some ancient Greeks believed that all matter was made up of four substances: fire, air, water, and earth

A much more modern perspective on atoms and interatomic forces was set out later in the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton

The modern Atomic Model was first developed by two key scientists Lavoisier and Dalton with the help of others.

he atomists held that there are two fundamentally different kinds of realities composing the natural world, atoms and void.

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier forever changed the practice and concepts of chemistry by forging a new series of laboratory analyses

J.J Thomson contributed massively to the model of the atom and the modern day theory.

The plum pudding model did not last long however, in 1909 a former pupil of Thomson’s, Ernest Rutherford discovered that the atom itself had a mass of positive charge

Ernest Rutherford, a British scientist conducted an experiment and based on the observations of this experiment, he explained the atomic structure of elements

To study such small entities, Ernest Rutherford relied on alpha particles, which are helium atoms stripped of their electrons

In the late 19th century, physicist J.J. Thomson began experimenting with cathode ray tubes.

Thomson assumed that an electron is two thousand times lighter than a proton and believed that an atom is made up of thousands of electrons.

The plum pudding model did not last long however, in 1909 a former pupil of Thomson’s, Ernest Rutherford discovered that the atom itself had a mass of positive charge

The Bohr model of the atom was proposed by Neil Bohr in 1915. I

Bohr’s hypothesis suggested that the energy of atomic electrons came in packages and only whole packages could be absorbed or emitted.

the work of Werner Heisenberg was important in quantifying this as a mathematical concept and furthering our understanding of the mysterious electron.

In Schrödinger's model, electrons do not follow sharply defined orbits (like in Bohr's model), but rather are found in orbitals. I

Erwin Schrodinger as well as being famous for his cats in radioactive boxes was a driving force behind the treatment of electrons as both waves and particles

In 1926, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger sed the wave-particle duality of the electron to develop and solve a complex mathematical equation that accurately described the behavior of the electron in a hydrogen atom.