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 wordatom comes 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.