-
460 BCE
Democritus (460-370 BC)
Democritus was a greek philosopher. He thought matter was composed of particles and that they are very tiny and invisible. Those particles were called atoms. Democritus believed they were uniform, solid, hard, incompressible and indestructible, and that they moved in infinite numbers through empty space. -
384 BCE
Aristotle (384 BC- 322 BC)
Aristotle, was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, and is known as one of the greatest intellectual figures in history. His range of knowledge was very vast, going from things like biology to zoology and everything in between. His ideas on ethics and the philosophy of science are still studied to this day. A lot of his studies served as a foundation for scientific discoveries following his work, and they continue to be debated today and used today in the atomic theory. -
Joseph Louis Proust (September 26, 1754- July 5, 1826)
Joseph Louis Proust, also known as Louis Proust, was a French chemist who proved that the relative quantities of any given pure chemical compounds elements remain constant regardless of the compounds source. This is called the Proust’s Law or the Law of Definite Proportions. In 1794, he published his theory which is the Law of Definite Proportions. The Proust’s Law is the fundamental principle of analytical chemistry. Joseph Proust is best known for being an analytical chemist. -
Billard Ball Model
Dalton figured that atoms were the smallest particles of matter, and he pictured them to be hard spheres, like a pool ball. He used wooden balls to model this. This basic model created a foundation for other models later on. -
Joseph Lucas (April 12, 1834- December 27, 1902)
While still in high school, Lucas introduced his model of the atom. He created a physical model that shows where electrons are located throughout the volume of the atoms. In the model, the electrons, protons, and neutrons are all based on a newer version of the Toroidal Ring. This model of the atom is the most successful model made. The “magic numbers” two, eight, 18, and 32 of electrons in a filled shell are predicted by this model and other big predictions. -
John Dalton (September 5, 1766- July 27, 1844)
John Dalton was an english scientists/chemist. He contributed to the atomic theory by discovering that only gas atoms that are the same in a mixture of gasses repel each other, explaining why they all seem to be moving independently. Even though this was wrong, these studies helped him discover that Democritus’ discovery that all atoms are alike was also wrong. -
JJ Thomson (December 18, 1856 - August 30, 1940)
JJ Thomson was an English physicist who greatly contributed to the Atomic Structure by by discovering the electron. He won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906, and strongly supported William Thomson in making the Plum Pudding Model. -
Marie Curie (November 7, 1867- July 4, 1934)
Marie Curie was a Polish/French physicist, who is famous today for her work on radioactivity and won the Nobel Prize twice. She and her husband, Henri Becquerel made the significant discoveries of polonium and radium. Following these discoveries she devoted her life to studying radioactivity. However, Marie’s long exposure to radium throughout her life caused her to get Leukemia, which took her life in 1934. She is still honored today for her studies and contributions to physics. -
Ernest Rutherford (August 30, 1871- October 19, 1937)
Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand-born physicist proposed a model with a description of the structure of atoms. The atom is described as a tiny, dense, positively charged core call a nucleus and nearly all the mass is concentrated, which is the light, and the negative part to it are called electrons and they circulate at a distance. Ernest Rutherford has also worked on the Rutherford gold-foil experiment and had his model replace the plum-pudding atomic model by Sir J.J. Thomson. -
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879- April 18, 1955)
Albert Einstein, a German theoretical physicist, who developed the theory of relativity, which is one of the two pillars of modern physics. In 1921, he won a Nobel Prize in Physics. When Einstein was 26-years-old, in 1905, he published his Theory of Relativity, now the General Theory of Relativity. He was named “the father of modern physics.” Einstein had also mathematically proved the existence of atoms which helped revolutionized all the sciences through the use of statistics and probability. -
Niels Bohr (October 7, 1885- November 18, 1962)
Proposed in 1913, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr created the description of the structure of atoms. The Bohr model was the first that incorporated quantum theory and was the predecessor of the full quantum-mechanical models. This model describes the properties of atomic electrons. Atoms emit or absorb radiation only when the electrons abruptly go between allowed or stationary states. It also explains how the electrons can have a stable orbit around the nucleus. -
Erwin Schrodinger (August 12, 1887- January 4, 1961)
Erwin Schrodinger was an Austrian physicist. He adopted an idea from Louis de Broglie that particles of matter have a dual nature, and will sometimes act like waves. He built upon the idea by creating an equation to describe the “wave”. Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus and Niels Bohr's description of the structure of atoms helped contribute to Erwin Schrodinger’s wave model equation, which describes the behavior of the quantum wave system. -
Alfred Luack Parson (October 24, 1889- January 1, 1970)
The British chemist, Alfred Parson, created the Parson magneton or magnetic election. It has many other name, but Toroidal Ring is best known. Parson has written a paper which argues that the electron in the Bohr model might be a ring of negative electricity spinning with a high velocity. In 1915, Parson published the final draft of his theory. The magnetic electron was a hypothetical object suggested by Parson, an electron ring that generates a magnetic field. -
James Chadwick (October 20, 1891- July 24, 1974)
James Chadwick, was a physicist who discovered the neutron. He studied under Rutherford at the University of Cambridge. He and Rutherford studied things such as the atomic nucleus, and the proton. He discovered neutrons by observing that when beryllium was “bombarded” with alpha particles it released an unknown radiation. He found that the particles of the mysterious mass were equal to the protons, but they had no electric charge. This "mass" is now called a neutron. -
Louis De Broglie (August 15, 1892- March 19, 1987)
Louis De Broglie was a physicist who is best known for his research on the quantum theory. He developed a thesis (which Erwin Schrodinger later used later in his studies) that proposed the idea that atoms might have wave properties. Albert Einstein's idea that light in certain wavelengths might behave as if they were composed of particles was the base idea for De Broglie's thesis. The wave model proved his idea that electrons move in a wave motion. -
Lucas Model
Joseph Lucas created a physical model that shows where electrons are located throughout the volume of the atoms. In the Lucas model, the electrons, protons, and neutrons are all based on Bergman’s Spinning Charged Ring Model of Elementary Particles, a newer version of the Toroidal Ring. This model of the atom is the most successful model out of all the models of the atom that have been proposed. -
Werner Heisenberg (December 5, 1901- February 1, 1976)
Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist, and he discovered a way to formulate quantum mechanics through matrices. He realized that he could express this through matrix algebra, which is an array of numbers organized in rows and columns. Schrodinger, discovered that their formulas were both mathematically similar, but they were unsure how they were physically related. uncertainty principle, which is that the velocity and position of an object cannot be measured at the same time. -
Plum Pudding Model
The Plum pudding model depicts that atoms are spheres of matter that is positively charged and have electrons within them. -
Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904- February 18, 1967)
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist. Oppenheimer was director of the Los Alamos Laboratory for the Manhattan Project. He became responsible for the research and design of the atomic bomb and was often known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” In 1942, Oppenheimer was already considered a remarkable theoretical physicist and had become very involved in exploring the possibility of an atomic bomb by the time the Manhattan Project was launched. -
Nuclear Model
The atom is described as a tiny, dense, positively charged core call a nucleus and nearly all the mass is concentrated, which is the light, and the negative part to it are called electrons. The electrons circulate at a distance, like how the planets circulate the sun. -
Bohr Model
The Bohr model was the first that was incorporated in the quantum theory and was the predecessor of the full quantum-mechanical models. This model describes the properties of atomic electrons. -
Toroidal Ring
Alfred Luack Parson created the Parson magneton or magnetic election. It was also known as the plasmoid ring, vortex ring, helicon ring, and the toroidal ring known today. The magnetic electron (Parson magneton) was a hypothetical object suggested by Parson, an electron ring that generates a magnetic field. This model of the atom inspired many other toroidal ring models. -
Wave Model
The wave model was in theory the idea that the electron was a 3D waveform that circles the nucleus. Erwin Schrodinger made equations could be used to describe this wave theory and support the wave hypothesis. -
Quantum Model
The uncertainty principle/quantum model, was discovered by Werner Heisenberg, and takes the Bohr model and Erwin Schrodinger's equations one step further. He uses equations to find the velocity and position of an electron, however, even in theory, these two things cannot be found at the same time.
