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INTRODUCTION

HOWDY READERS AND STUDENTS!

In this project, you will encounter different scientists who are the ones who were able to
contribute to the development of the atomic theory. It is very interesting to know these scientists
and the story how they discovered their theories. This would also help you understand and
recognize the importance of these scientific discoveries in our times today.

There are many scientists that also revised the theories presented in this project and made it more
concrete and improved to make an exact conclusion.

In this project you will also encounter atoms, neutrons, laws, and many more. You would also
know a little bit of biography of each of the scientists. But most of all, you would learn more
about the atoms.
You would also encounter if how the scientist discovered it, so what are you waiting for? Read
now!
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Democritus said that atoms were invisible, indestructible, and the smallest particle of matter. He
believed that these atoms differ in shape, size, weight, sequence, and position. This concept of
atoms refuted the idea of Empedocles that the world was composed of air, earth, fire, and water.
This persisted through Roman times but was refuted during the Middle Ages because the models
were based on reasoning and imagination rather than on experimental evidences.cHis
exact contributions are difficult to disentangle from his mentor Leucippus, as they are often
mentioned together in texts. Their speculation on atoms, taken from Leucippus, bears a passing
and partial resemblance to the nineteenth-century understanding of atomic structure that has led
some to regard Democritus as more of a scientist than other Greek philosophers; nevertheless
their ideas rested on very different bases. Largely ignored in Athens, Democritus was
nevertheless well-known to his fellow northern-born philosopher Aristotle. Plato is said to have
disliked him so much that he wished all his books burnt. Many consider Democritus to be the
"father of modern science".

Once back in Abdera, Democritus spent much of his time in study and in writing many dozens of
books on a wirde ange of subjects. The central theme to all his work appears to be the atomic
theory that he built by extending the ideas of his teacher Leucippus. In their system, all matter is
based on immutable and indivisible basic elements (r
r, or 'indivisibles') which move about in
an infinite emptiness (
, 'the void').

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4ohn Dalton, an English chemist and physicist, stated his atomic theory based on approximately
150 years of investigation by scientists such as Robert Boyle, 4oseph Priestly, and Antoiine
Lavoisier.

Daltons fascination with science included a intense interest in meteorology. Starting in 1793
4ohn kept careful daily weather records for 46 years. The meteorology study
here led Dalton to a interest in the gases of the air and their ultimate components. This interest of
gases led to Daltons discovery of the Atomic Theory.
Dalton's Discovery

4ohn Dalton was a humble man with several apparent handicaps: he was poor, he was not
articulate, he was not a skilled experimentalist, and he was color blind. These
disadvantages are a terrible problem for a chemist, but in spite of these Dalton made his most
important contribution to science called the atomic theory. The theory consists
that matter is composed of atoms of differing weights and combine in simple ratio¶s by weight.
Dalton was the first to prepare a table of relative atomic weights. This theory
which Dalton first advanced in 1803, is the cornerstone of modern physical science. Dalton's
atomic theory rests on the following postulates:
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Dalton¶s model of the atom was accepted for about 100 years because he used it to support two
fundamental laws of nature²the law of conservation of mass and the law of definite
composition.

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4.4 Thomson
He was one of the scientists who observed in discharge tubes (cathode ray tubes). They
suggested the existence of negatively charged particles which were later called electrons. The
same term (electron) was used by George Stoney earlier, in 1874, to describe the charge of a
single unit of electricity.
In 1897, Thmson used magnetic and electric fields to measure the value of the ratio of the
electron charge e to its mass .
Thomson was shocked to find out that this mass is 1/1840 the mass of hydrogen, the lightest
atom. The uncuttable was cut; there was a subatomic world.
Another important finding was the fact that although electrons have negative charges, the overall
charge of the atoms is zero. So atoms must contain enough positive charge that cancels the
negative charge. Thomson proposed a model of an atom as a positively charged sphere where the
electrons arte embedded. This model is sometimes referred to as a ³watermelon model´ with the
electrons where the raisins are the electrons.
He is credited for the discovery of the electron and of isotopes, and the invention of the mass
spectrometer. Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the
electron and for his work on the conduction of electricity in gases.
 "  $! amidst glowing glass tubes and the hum of electricity, the British
physicist 4.4. Thomson was venturing into the interior of the atom. At the Cavendish Laboratory
at Cambridge University, Thomson was experimenting with currents of electricity inside empty
glass tubes. He was investigating a long-standing puzzle known as "cathode rays." His
experiments prompted him to make a bold proposal: these mysterious rays are streams of
particles much smaller than atoms, they are in fact minuscule pieces of atoms. He called these
particles "corpuscles," and suggested that they might make up all of the matter in atoms. It was
startling to imagine a particle residing OO  the atom--most people thought that the atom was
indivisible, the most fundamental unit of matter.
Thomson's speculation was not unambiguously supported by his experiments. It took more
experimental work by Thomson and others to sort out the confusion. The atom is now known to
contain other particles as well. Yet Thomson's bold suggestion that cathode rays were material
constituents of atoms turned out to be correct. The rays are made up of electrons: very small,
negatively charged particles that are indeed fundamental parts of every atom.

   $ based on the electron, leading to television and the computer
and much else, evolved through many difficult steps. Thomson's careful experiments and
adventurous hypotheses were followed by crucial experimental and theoretical work by many
others in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and elsewhere. These physicists opened for us a
new perspective--a view from OO the atom.
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Marie Curie and Pierre Curie

In 1896, Henri Becquerel, a French physicist, associated X-ray with fluorescent materials. He
used a uranium ore containing fluorescent material and found that it emitted radiation
continuously, even when it was not fluorescing, One of Becquerel¶s students, Marie Curie
suggested the name ´radioactivity´ for this phenomenon,. Amu material such as uranium that
spontaneously emits radiation is said to be radioactive. At Becquerel¶s encouragement, Marie
and her husband Pierre began their famous experiments to isolate the radioactive components of
uranium ± radium and polonium. This proved that atoms have internal structure. This was
supported by Thomson through the result of his work on cathode rays.

Marie Curie¶s achievements include the creation of a theory of @r O
r O
O  (a term she coined),
techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two new
elements, polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted
into the treatment of neoplasms (cancers) using radioactive isotopes.
While an actively loyal French citizen, she never lost her sense of Polish identity. She named the
first newchemical element that she discovered polonium (1898) for her native country,[3] and in
1932 she founded a Radium Institute (now the Maria Skłodowska±Curie Institute of Oncology)
in her home town, Warsaw, headed by her physician sister Bronisława.

Pierre Curie studied ferromagnetism, paramagnetism, and diamagnetism for his doctoral thesis,
and discovered the effect of temperature on paramagnetism
which is now known as Curie's law. The material constant in
Curie's law is known as the Curie constant. He also discovered
that ferromagnetic substances exhibited a critical
temperature transition, above which the substances lost their
ferromagnetic behavior. This is
now known as the Curie point.cc
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of Radioactivity into an exact and

documented proof that the atoms
Ernest Rutherford

Rutherford, Ernest (1871-1937): Born in New Zealand, Rutherford studied under 4. 4. Thomson
at the Cavendish Laboratory in England. His work constituted a notable landmark in the history
of atomic research as he developed Bacquerel's discovery of the heavier elements, which had
been thought to be immutable, actually disintegrate (decay) into various forms of
radiation.Rutherford was the first to establish the theory of the nuclear atom and to carry out a
transmutation reaction (1919) (formation of hydrogen and and oxygen isotope by bombardment
of nitrogen with alpha particles). Uranium emanations were shown to consist of three types of
rays, alpha (helium nuclei) of low penetrating power, beta (electrons), and gamma, of
exceedingly short wavelength and great energy.

Ernest Rutherford also discovered the half-life of radioactive elements and applied this to studies
of age determination of rocks by measuring the decay period of radium to lead-206.

The discovery of radioactivity paved the way for studying the internal structure of the atom. In
1910, British physicist Ernest Rutherford gave his 21-year-old student Ernest Marsden a research
project to verify Thomson¶s model of the atom. Marsden and Hans Geiger, Rutherford¶s
assistant, used alpha particles to probe atom. They thought that alpha p[articles should go
through thin gold foil undeflected. However, they were surprised when a very small fraction-
about 1 in 8000- of the alpha particles bounced back at large angles. From the result of his
student¶s experiments, Rutherford explained that the few positively charged alpha particles that
bounced back at large angles must have collided with very tiny but concentrated mass of positive
charge. This refuted the atomic model if Thomson. He proposed that most of the mass and
positively charged parts of the atom, the protons, must be concentrated in a small region called
the nucleus. He thought that the electrons are distributed in the space outside the nucleus of the
atom.
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4ames Chadwick
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The discovery of the third particle of the atom occurred in 1932. 4ames Chadwick, one of
Rutherford¶s former students, showed that each uncharged particle emitted by radioactive atoms
has a mass approximately equal to a proton. These neutral particles were called neutrons.
Chadwick revised Rutherford¶s nuclear model and proposed that the nucleus contains protons
and neutrons.

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He bombarded the alpha rays (coming out from a natural radioactive material) onBeryllium atom
and observed that Beryllium artificially became radioactive for a short time it emitted material
rays containing neutral particles having mass almost equal to proton he proposed the name
Neutron for the newly discovered particle, he also observed that after short radioactivity
Beryllium was converted in to Carbon,
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The " is a subatomic particle with no net electric charge and a mass slightly larger than
that of a proton