WHAT ARE ATOMS?

HOW
WAS ITS MODEL DEVELOPED?
LESSON 2
 OBJECTIVES
•Describe atoms and elements as described by the Ancient Greeks
•Provide examples of the early contributions of alchemy to
chemistry and science

•Explain how modern chemistry evolved from alchemy

•Describe atoms accroding to the models of Thomsom, Rutherford,
Bohr, and Schrodinger

•Differentiate the modern concepts of the atom with the Ancient

Greeks’ concepts

THE ATOMIC THEORY ACCORDING

TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS
 Democritus
• He believed that everything was
ulitmately made up of ‘atomos’,
a tiny, indivisible, unchangeable,
and indestructible sphere.

• Atomos make up the universe

while continuosly moving in the
void that surrounds them.

 Aristotle
• The Four classical “elements” -
re, air, water, and earth

• He de ned the elements by

using a combination of an
arbitary sets of dichotomies that
he thought were the
fundamental properties of
material reality.
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CONTRIBUTIONS OF ALCHEMY TO
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN
CHEMISTRY
 Alchemy
• Refers to a set of traditions,
practices, and speculations that
seeks aand purports to transform
ordinary metals into more
precious ones, as well as cure
diseases, reverse aging, and
achieve immortality.

• Transmutation which is the

process of transformation of base
and common metals into gold.

 Alchemy
• Alchemy laid the foundation for modern chemistry.
• Alchemists from greece experimented with chemical processes.

• They invented and de ned techniques on, Distillation, the puri cation
of mixtures by boiling and cooling; and Sublimation, phase change of
solid to gas.

• They also did experiments involving base metals, organic materials,

and Theion hydōr (sulfuric acid) to produce colorful solutions that
looked magical and strange for onlookers.

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 Alchemy
• Arab alchemist built on the knowledge that their Greek counterparts
and expanded the eld.

• Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan experimented with sulfer and mecury
and wrote detailed descriptions concerning the production of alloys,
as well as the puri cation and testing of metals.

• Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi described the method of preparing

aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids that can dissolve
gold.
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 Alchemy
• There was transfer of knowledge from Arab to Europe. During this time
European alchemists started studying the properties of various minerals.

• Through the methods developed by the European alchemist , they

discovered that alchoholic drinks can be produced through distillation.

• These distilled alcoholic drink were collectively called aqua vitae or the
“water of life” in latin.

• Paracelsus studied the medicinal potential of these substances, and many

alchemist ended up becoming doctors, pharmacist, or “royal distillers” for
Eurpean monarchs.

 THE DEVELOPMENT OF JOHN

DALTON’S MODEL OF THE ATOM
 Robert Boyle
• Introduced a system of quantitative
measurements and comparisons in
experiments that aim to study the
behavior of gases.

• He was also the rst one to de ne an

“element” as “anything that cannot be
broken down into two or several simpler
substances”

• His more general de nition of element

was more consistent with observations
and led to the discovery of more
elements.

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Antoine Lavoisier
• He conducted a series of
quantitative experiments that led
to the formulation of the nasic
laws that govern the behavior of
a matter.

• Law of Conservation of Mass,

which states that matter can
neither be created nor
destroyed.

 Joseph Proust
• He conducted a different set of
quantitative experiments that
sought to determine how new
compounds form from an inital
set of materials.

• Law of De nite Proportions,

which states that all compounds
are made up of xed
proportions or ratios of
elements.
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 John Dalton
• Dalton hypothesized that for Proust’s
Law of De nite Proportions to work,
elements musy appear and behave like
tiny particles when they combined to
form a given compound.

• A given compound would always have

the same combnation of these atoms.

• The tendency of elements to exist in

ratios of small whole numbers in
compounds become become what is
known as the Law of Multiple
Proportions.
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 Atomic Theory
• All matter consists of indivisible particles called atom.
• Atoms of the same lement have the same shape and
mass.

• Atoms of an element have properties that are distinct

from the atom of another element.

• Atoms can neither be created nor destroyed.

• Atoms from different elements can combine with each
other in xed ratios to form compounds.

• Atoms are the smallest unit of matter hat participate

in chemical reactions; as such chemical reactions
involve changes in the way atoms are combined.

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 MODELS OF THE ATOM’SS STRUCTURE

ACCORDING TO THOMSON,
RUTHERFORD, BOHR, AND SCHRÖDINGER
John Joseph Thompson
• He discovered that there was a particle
even lighter than the mass of the lightest
element.

• His discovery of the electron, which proved

the existence of subatomic particles -
smaller particles that makes up the atom.

• Plum pudding model, wherein the atom

consissts of negatively chardeg electron
particles scattered throughout a positively
charged cloud.

Earnest Rutherford
• He conducted their classic gold foil experiment
that led to the discovery of the atomic nucleus.

• The experiment shows how some alpha particle

that pass through the gold foil slightly de ected
when it reached the center.

• This can only happen if the atom has a dense,

positively charged center, and it also means the
atom consists of empy space.

• This model of the atom became what is known as

the nuclear model.

• The positively charged particle at the cecnter of

the atom was called the “proton”.

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 Niels Bohr
• He proposed a variant of Rutherford’s nuclear
model.

• The model is dubbed as the “planetary model”

the electron follows a strict orbit when circling
around the nucleus.

• James Chadwick discovered neutron a decade

after the gold foil experiment further re ned the
nuclear model.

• In this model, the atom is thought to consist of

negatively charged electrons moving around the
postively charged nucleus, which is composed of
protons and neutrons.

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Erwin Schrödinger
• And Werner Heisenberg demostrated the
electrons were moving around rhe nucleus
so fast that their exact position cant be
pinpoined with certainty.

• Schrödinger proposed an alternative model

wherein instead of orbits, the propability of
an electron being located within a particular
region is represented as a “cloud”.

• This model, the electron cloud model, is

currently accepted depiction of an atom’s
structure.