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Democritus was a Greek scholar who is well known for his atomic theory.
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Antoine Lavoisier was a French man who is known as "The Father of Modern Chemistry." Dalton's modern atomic theory was based on much of his work.
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John Dalton was an English chemist best known for his atomic theory. In this theory, he said that,
1. All matter is made of atoms. These atoms are indivisible and indestructible.
2. All atoms of an element are the same.
3. Compounds are formed combining two+ atoms.
4. A chemical reaction is merely a rearrangement of atoms. Modern atomic theory is based on this original one proposed by Dalton. -
J.J Thomson was a British physicist interested in atomic structure.
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Max Planck was a German physicst who put much focus on thermodynamics and eventually came up with his own theory.
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Marie Curie was a Polish woman who dedicated her life to science. She discovered radium, a radioactive element. She seperated this element to analyze the physical properties and to better understand how it works.
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Rutherford was a New Zealand-born chemist who proposed that the atom was not indivisible nor unchangeable. He published 80 papers in his life time, and worked in many different locations.
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Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist widely known for his theory of relativity, and the equation that goes with it; E=mc^2.
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Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who put forth the Bohr Model of an atom.
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Erwin Schrodinger was an Austrian physicist who came up with an equation to explain the movement of an electron. His method was preferred over Heisenburg's, but Schrodinger showed how both were correct.
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James Chadwick was an English scientist who discovered the neutron. He found that the neutron had no charge unlike the rest of the particles in an atom. His discovery would also lead to the possibility of creating an atomic bomb.
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Louis De Broglie was a French scientist who suggested that particles in an atom are both particles and waves, and he introduced this concept in 1921.
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Planck proposed that energy does not flow continuously. Instead, he said that energy is delivered in discrete packets. He named this quanta.
Ex: A hot iron poker glows both red and white at the same time. -
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While this was an honor, Rutherford was put off. He was, after all, a physicist. He believed chemistry was underneath him.
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Rutherford performed an experiment, now called the Rutherford model, where a beam of alpha particles was shot to a piece of gold foil. This gold foil was surrounded by a flourescent screen. When the alpha particles hit the screen, the screen would light up. When observing this, you can see that the beam did not go straight through the foil. This caused Rutherford to believe that an atom must have some kind of nucleus and when it is hit with the particles, they are deflected.
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Schrodinger became interested in wave mechanics after reading a footnote on a paper by Albert Einstein. His work was published the following year.
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Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist who discovered a quantum property of particles. He proposed that a particle had 3 parts and each part held a fraction of a charge. This idea of fractional charge was not accepted until 1974. Gell-Mann also attended many universities, including Yale where he started at just 15.
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Chadwick receives the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of the neutron.
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"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."
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After hearing that German scientists were working to split the atom, Bohr goes to the U.S. The U.S. then launches the Manhatten Project to create an atomic bomb.
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"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a very narrow field."
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"Imagination is more than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encicles the world."
