Atom and Atomic Theory

The word
‘
atom
’
was first coined by Democritus (500 B.C.) from the Greek
atomos

(“uncuttable”)
, which refers to small, indivisible particles that he believed comprised allmatter. This claim was
challenged many years later until experimental evidence solidifiedsome of its tenets. For
example, evidences now point that atoms are not exactly indivisible asthey consist of subatomic
particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. In 1808, Englishscientist John Dalton
formulated the definition of atoms as follows: (1) atoms compriseelements, (2) atoms of one
element are all identical in size, mass, and chemical properties butalso differ from atoms of
another element, (3) compounds are composed of atoms of morethan one element in whole
number ratio, and (4) chemical reactions involve rearrangement ofatoms, not their creation or
destruction. The first statement means that atoms are building blocks of matter. The second
derives itself from a fundamental characteristic that all atoms ofone element have the same
number of protons and that no two different elements have thesame number of protons, and this
property became known as atomic number. The third onemeans that formation of compounds
require specific elements in a specific ratio, and this property is said to be an extension of two
principles: (1)
law of definite proportions
, whichstates that different samples of the same compound contain elements in the same
proportion,(2)
law of multiple proportions
, which states that when two elements combine to form morethan one compound, the masses of
the comprising elements exist in whole number ratio,which means that different compounds
made up of the same elements differ in the number ofatoms of each element. The last statement
is consistent with the
law of conservation of mass
,where matter can neither be destroyed or created. All these insights were so groundbreakingthat
they paved the rapid advancement of chemistry back in 1900s (Chang 1170).