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History Of An Atom. In This Day And Age, Almost Every Educated

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History of an Atom
In this day and age, almost every educated middle school student would be able to sketch and label a given diagram of an atom. However, still to this day, not one human has seen what an atom looks like. Our current atomic model, the same one in which you most likely learnt in 5th grade, is really just an educated theory, comprised of years of experimental trials and errors. In fact, the ‘original’ four elements, introduced by ancient philosopher Aristotle: Fire Air, Water, and Earth, were once believed the only elements forming natural matter. Although frowned upon by the ancient Greek society, philosophers Leucippus and Democritus developed their own theoretical understanding of nature. Their theory concluded that every …show more content…

His diagram quickly gained the label ‘plum pudding,’ as the electrons similarly resembled the plum slices inside of a pudding.

1909: Ernest Rutherford
The atomic model evolved to a familiar diagram following the results of Rutherford’s popular gold foil experiment. Essentially, a student of Rutherford’s class had been examining the possible pattern of positively charged particles contacting the element of gold. While filming the student’s examination, Rutherford noticed that most of the particles flew straight through, and only a tiny portion either bounced straight back or off of an angle. If Thomson’s model was correct, all of the radium particles should have bounced off of the foil- however, they did not. This led Rutherford to believe that the positive charge of an atom is not equal to the whole of an atom, but rather an even smaller core, located in the middle of the atom, surrounded by the negatively charged electrons. He concluded that the atom is mostly empty space, and that most of the atoms mass came from the small central core- which he declared the nucleus.
1913: Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr, a former student of Rutherford, proposed his own theory: the quantum theory. Furthering Rutherford’s model, Bohr insisted that electrons spin around the nucleus in ‘fixed orbits’, such as planets around the sun. The outer & inner orbit/s have only a certain amount of constant energy,

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