Atomic Theory

A theory of the structure and behavior of atoms has taken more than two
millenia to evolve, from the abstract musings of ancient Greek philosophers to
the high-tech experiments of modern scientists. However, prior to the scientific
revolution and the development of the scientific method starting in the 16th
century, ideas about the atom were mainly speculative. It wasn't until the very
end of the 19th century that technology became advanced enough to allow
scientists a glimpse of the atom's constituent parts: the electron, nucleus, proton,
and neutron.
Greek Origins
The idea that all matter is made up of tiny, indivisible particles, or atoms, is
believed to have originated with the Greek
philosopher Leucippus of Miletus and his student Democritus of Abdera in the
5th century B.C. (The word atomcomes from the Greek word atomos, which
means indivisible.) These thinkers held that, in addition to being too small to
be seen, unchangeable, and indestructible, atoms were also completely solid,
with no internal structure, and came in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes,
which accounted for the different kinds of matter. Color, taste, and other
intangible qualities were also thought to be composed of atoms.
While the idea of the atom was supported by some later Greek philosophers, it
was fiercely attacked by others, including Aristotle, who argued against the
existence of such particles. During the Middle Ages in Europe, Roman Catholic
theologians were heavily influenced by Aristotle's ideas, and so atomic
philosophy was largely dismissed for centuries. However, the Greeks'
conception of the atom survived, both in Aristotle's works (his arguments
against) and in another classical work by the Roman author Lucretius, De rerum
natura (On the Nature of Things), which was rediscovered in Europe at the
start of the Renaissance.


Modern Development
Modern atomic theory is generally said to begin with John Dalton, an English
chemist and meteorologist who in 1808 published a book on the atmosphere and
the behavior of gases that was entitled A New System of Chemical
Philosophy. Dalton's theory of atoms rested on four basic ideas: chemical
elements were composed of atoms; the atoms of an element were identical in
weight; the atoms of different elements had different weights; and atoms
combined only in small whole-number ratios, such as 1:1, 1:2, 2:1, 2:3, to form
compounds.
Not all of these ideas were new; the Greeks had already introduced the idea that
elements were composed of atoms and that atoms of different elements had
different physical properties. Dalton's particular contribution, which
distinguished his work from what had been done before, was his method for
actually determining atomic weight. In an essay published in 1805, Dalton had
included a list of atomic weights for 21 elements. Dalton was also the first to
propose standard symbols for the elements.


Subatomic Structure
Dalton's work was mainly about the chemistry of atomshow they combined to
form new compoundsrather than the physical, internal structure of atoms,
although he never denied the possibility of atoms' having a substructure.
Modern theories about the physical structure of atoms did not begin until 1897,
with J. J. Thomson's discovery of theelectron.
Actually, what Thomson discovered was that cathode rays were streams of
negatively charged particles with a mass about 1,000 times smaller than a
hydrogen atom. He claimed that these particles, which he called corpuscles,
were the things that atoms were made from. The term electron predated
Thomson's discoverya few years earlier Irish physicist G. J. Stoney had
proposed that electricity was made of negative particles called electrons, and
scientists had adopted the word to refer to anything with an electric charge.
However, Thomson, who was a physicist at Cambridge University, was the first
to suggest that these particles were a building block of the atom.
Thomson also tried to show how the electrons were situated in the atom. Since
atoms were known to be electrically neutral, Thomson proposed (1904) a model
in which the atom was a positively charged sphere studded with negatively
charged electrons. It was called the plum-pudding model, since the electrons
in the atom resembled the raisins in a plum pudding. This model did not survive
unchallenged for long. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford's experiments with alpha rays
led him to describe the atom as a small, heavy nucleus with electrons in orbit
around it. This nuclear model of the atom became the basis for the one that is
still accepted today.


Bohr and Beyond
In 1913, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had studied under both Thomson and
Rutherford, further refined the nuclear model by proposing that electrons moved
only in restricted, successive orbital shells and that the outer, higher-energy
orbits determined the chemical properties of the different elements.
Furthermore, Bohr was able to explain the spectral lines of the different
elements by suggesting that as electrons jumped from higher to lower orbits,
they emitted energy in the form of light. In the 1920s, Bohr's theory became the
basis for quantum mechanics, which explained in greater detail the complex
structure and behavior of atoms.



Protons and Neutrons
Since Thomson's discovery of the electron in 1897, scientists had realized that
an atom must contain a positive charge to counterbalance the electrons' negative
charge. In 1919, as a byproduct of his experiments on the splitting of atomic
nuclei, Rutherford discovered the proton, which constitutes the nucleus of a
hydrogen atom. A proton carries a single positive electrical charge, and every
atomic nucleus contains one or more protons. Although Rutherford proposed
the existence of a neutral subatomic particle, the neutron, in 1920, the actual
discovery was made by English physicist James Chadwick, a former student of
Rutherford, in 1932.