Ch 1 notes Origin of the elements The current big bang theory of the origin of the universe postulates that

the initial material in the early universe was mostly hydrogen, with a little helium. How then did we get all the elements were made of today? The answer is that they were synthesized in stars; after large clumps of hydrogen gravitationally collapsed to form the first stars, nuclear fusion reactions began to fuse hydrogen nuclei together to create heavier elements, initially helium then carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements that make up our own bodies. All of us are made of elements that once were produced in the interiors of stars. These elements are blown away continually from the surfaces of the stars as solar wind, and expelled at the end of the stars life in more spectacular ways. An atom is made up of a heavy nucleus, containing protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. Nuclear Fusion can occur because heavier nuclei are more stable (lower in energy a theme that well meet again and again) than lighter ones, up to a point that point lying somewhere in the vicinity of the iron nucleus at mass 56, with 20 protons and 36 neutrons. The plot shows the binding energy per nucleon for pretty well all the known nuclei both stable and radioactive (see also Fig 16.3 in your text, p. 604). The binding energy is the energy released if we assemble a given nucleus from individual protons and neutrons collectively we call these nucleons. The attractive forces between nucleons are extremely strong but also are very shortrange: at distances greater than a few fm (1 femtometer is 10-15 meters and about the size of the nucleus you need to learn these prefixes milli-, micro-, nano-, femto-, etc and what they correspond to in powers of 10) neutrons dont interact with other subatomic particles and protons, being positively charged, repel other protons. However, when the nucleons protons and neutrons get as close as they are in the nucleus i.e. about 1 fm, 10-15 m apart, they attract each other very strongly: the socalled strong nuclear force between such particles is about a million times stronger than chemical bond energies holding together molecules. [You experience similar short-range forces any time you use Scotch tape when the adehsive on the tape is any further than a few atomic diameters from a surface there is NO detectable

attractive force, but when you push the tape into atomic contact then the attractive force is quite strong. For nucleons to attract they have to be pushed into nuclear contact.] When particles that attract each other come together and stick, energy is released. When the H nuclei in the stars fuse together to produce heavier elements, the process is exceptionally exothermic: a great deal of energy is given off. Nuclear energy powers the sun and other stars: under the enormous gravitational pressures in the suns interior, positively charged H nuclei (called protons) can be forced together against their mutual electrostatic repulsion so that they fuse together to form He nuclei which are a lot lighter, and again the missing mass shows up as energy. This process has also been harnessed by humans in hydrogen bombs, and (we hope) some time in the future hydrogen fusion reactors for energy production. The fusion reactions are as follows:
1 1

1 1

2 1

e+

<

0.42 MeV

2 hydrogen nuclei (called protons) fuse to make a nucleus that is the mass 2 isotope of hydrogen (called deuterium) with 1 proton and 1 neutron. The extra positive charge from the second proton is carried away as a positively-charged electron, or positron.
2 1

1 1

3 2

He

E = -1.02 MeV

The deuteron (deuterium nucleus) reacts with another proton to form a mass 3 helium isotope (2 protons, 1 neutron)
3 2 3 2 4 2

He

He

He

2( 11H)

E = -12.86 MeV

Two helium-3 nuclei fuse to produce stable helium-4 and two protons again. The overall process is: 4 11 H 6
4 2

He

2 0 1 e+

E = -15.74 MeV

[Note that although the overall reaction is the dusion of FOUR hydrogen nuclei, having four particles collide simultaneously is extremely unlikely, even atthe hude densities in the interior of the Sun, and so the process in fact takes place in a series of 2-particle collisions. We will meet this idea again when we study chemical kinetics in CHM 118 even complicated chemical reactions take place in, at most, 2-particle collisions.] The above are the dominant reactions in the sun; other reactions become important in larger stars. A few words on the terminology (well get more deeply into nuclear reactions in CHM 118): The superscript (1H) gives the mass number. This is NOT the atomic mass, but the particle count of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. The subscript (2He) is the nuclear charge in other words the proton count. Other stuff is emitted when nuclei fuse together. In the first reaction a positively-charged electron, or positron is emitted (in order for the charge to balance a nucleus with two protons and no neutrons is unstable), together with a particle called a neutrino (symbol < ) which has zero charge and almost zero mass and whose function is to carry

away some of the energy. The numbers reflect the energy change the - sign means that the products are lower in energy than the reactants because energy has been lost or emitted and the units are millions of electron-volts, MeV. One electron-volt is the energy gained by an electron falling through a potential difference of 1 volt. Electron volts are handy units in chemistry because they are about the same size as chemical reaction energies. Most chemical bond strengths are in the range 2-10 eV, and chemical explosives generate energies of about this amount per molecule of explosive. As you can see, nuclear reactions generate about a million times more energy than do chemical reactions. Further nuclear reactions that we wont discuss here result in the buildup of all the elements whose production results in energy release i.e. up to Fe in the binding energy curve. Near the end of their life i.e. after most of their hydrogen fuel has been burned up to form heavier elements, stars the size of the sun spew out a large amount of their material to form a planetary nebula such as the Ring Nebula shown here and slowly collapse to form a white dwarf star. This is how the elements were made of get out of the stars that make them.

You may notice on the binding energy plot that the binding energies start to rise past the production of Fe. This must mean the heavier nuclei are less stable than Fe and in fact it should be possible to gain energy from breaking up the heavier nuclei into smaller pieces i.e. we would move downhill on the energy plot (this process is called nuclear fission). This also means that its not possible for the stars to produce the heavier elements in a straightforward simple process if this were a chemical process we would say that the system reaches equilibrium at Fe. The heavier trace elements that are essential to our health iodine for our thyroids for example, selenium for certain special proteins wouldnt exist. (Nor would gold for jewellery, platinum for catalytic convertors on our cars, tungsten for light bulb filaments etc. etc.) Instead, these elements are made when a star significantly more massive than the Sun explodes as a supernova. The image to the left is of the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova explosion seen on earth in the year 1054. The star that blew up was so massive that gravity would have forced it to collapse in on itself if not for the intense heat and high pressure resulting from nuclear fusion. When almost all the hydrogen fuel has been consumed, the internal pressure can no longer hold off a collapse, and the star first implodes in on itself, then explodes spectacularly the 1054

supernova was visible in daylight for about 3 weeks. In the supernova explosion there is a rich flood of nuclear reactions that rapidly build up the heavier elements and then these cannot split apart again before they are expelled into space by the explosion. So while most of the elements in our bodies were made in stars like the sun and expelled in beautiful planetary nebulae, the crucial heavier elements were made in supernova explosions some of the most violent events in our universe. Atomic masses The nuclear binding energies are so large that the energy emitted when heavier nuclei are formed can actually be weighed. On the present atomic mass scale we stipulate that the mass of an atom of 12C is exactly 12 units (12 u). Twelve H atoms weigh almost 12.1 u almost 1% heavier. The missing mass when C is made from H is given off as energy, and according to Einsteins 1905 equation, that energy has mass: E = mc2 where c is the velocity of light, 3 x 108 m/s. Energies in nuclear reactions are enormous because the factor c2 is so huge: 9 x 1016 (m/s)2. So, for example, lets work in SI units (for convenience) and ask how about much energy would be produced if we converted 12 kg of hydrogen to carbon. The mass difference is about 1% as noted, or12 kg x 0.01, or 0.12 kg. Multiplying by c2 gives us the energy in SI units or joules: Energy = 0.12 kg x (3 x 108 m/s)2 = 1.1 x 1016 J

This is something more than the annual output of a nuclear power station so you can see why there continues to be a substantial international effort to carry out controlled nuclear fusion. Sufficiently accurate measurements of atomic masses were made possible by the invention of the mass spectrometer, by the Englishman F.W. Aston after World War I.

The plot shows what Aston called his packing fraction curve: measurements of the tiny mass differences (these are calculated per atomic particle or nucleon) for the easy elements to analyze: note the similarity to the binding energy plot. The first measurements that indicated the shape of the binding energy plot were published in 1927 by Aston working in Cambridge, UK, and scientists immediately realized the enormity of the nuclear energy that could be released if, for example, the heaviest nuclei ( around mass 200, say) could be broken up into smaller, lighter nuclei (around mass 100). It was not yet clear how such energy could be accessed. In 1933 Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard (then living in London after fleeing anti-Jewish violence in his native country) conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction if the breakup of one heavy nucleus could somehow induce the breakup of a second, and so on, then the reaction could be continuous, and extremely rapid, leading to an explosion of unimaginable force. He was so concerned about the implications of this idea that he patented it, then offered the patent to the British Army so that they could keep it secret. The Army turned him down! Eventually the British Navy accepted the patent. Szilard did not have any idea how to execute his idea experimentally i.e. which, if any of the heavy nuclei would behave as he wanted. But in 1939 on the eve of World War II radiochemist Otto Hahn working in Berlin discovered that uranium nuclei could be split apart by the impact of neutrons (neutral atomic particles with about the same mass as the proton, discovered in 1932). Many physicists realized that each nuclear fission event would produce some extra neutrons that could cause further fission events leading to Szilards chain reaction. Work immediately began in Britain to explore this, while Szilard, now in the US, persuaded Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt alerting him to the military danger of Germany making an atomic bomb. Thus the US Manhattan Project began, finally resulting in the bombs that obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and ended the war. Atoms and atomic structure Chemistry is the science of atoms and how they combine, and the properties of the compounds they make. By about 1900 most of the 80-odd naturally occurring elements on the earth's surface had been identified, their strikingly diverse properties cataloged, and chemists, particularly the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev had shown that elements could be grouped according to similar sets of chemical properties in what we now call the Periodic Table. But an explanation of why elements resembled or differed from each other was lacking. By 1900 it was quite firmly established that elements are made up of atoms, and so any such explanation must be based on the properties of these tiny particles. First, let's ask how we knew back then that atoms existed. What was the evidence? Dalton's atomic theory: atomic weights and combining weights Progress in science is often driven by developments in technology the ability to make new types of measurement usually underscores new discoveries. For the atomic theory the enabling technology was something that now seems quite prosaic (and that we now use in high school and college chemistry labs) the development of the accurate chemical balance, enabling in the late 18th century the first accurate measurements of the weights of chemical reagents and their reaction products. Careful measurements by Lavoisier in France of reactions in sealed vessels (so some

products could not escape) established the principle of conservation of matter that the mass of reaction products is the sum of masses of the reagents, if the experiment is done with sufficient care that all the reactants are accounted for. At the same time Proust was demonstrating that for a given reaction the ratio of the reactant weights was a constant (law of constant proportions) again this required great experimental care. The jump from these observations to Daltons atomic theory is really an exceptional leap, and yet the only possible way to go. Think for a while how to explain the fact that 23 grams of sodium always react exactly with 35.5 grams of chlorine to form common salt (sodium chloride) if we dont allow the possibility of atoms. If we add 23 g of sodium to 40 g of chlorine, how does the sodium know not to react with the excess 4.5 g of chlorine? There was a further set of facts available to Dalton: sometimes two elements will combine in more than one ratio. For example, 12 g of C combine with 16 g of O; but also we can make a compound in which 12 g of C combine with 32 g of O. What Dalton realized was that the ratio of the masses of O combining with a fixed mass of C was itself always a simple ratio: in this case 32:16, or 2. This was called by Dalton the law of multiple proportions. These two sets of facts were what Dalton used to formulate his atomic theory. (Note that the idea that matter was somehow constituted of tiny, invisible, indivisible particles had been suggested over 2000 years earlier in Ancient Greece, and later in India, and again in the Islamic Golden Age of Arabic science in the 11th century. But there was no way to specify any testable properties of these atoms or explain how they made up all the different materials in the world. What Dalton suggested in 1808 was that all atoms of the same element were identical in that they had the same mass. Also that when elements reacted to form compounds, the atoms always combined in fixed whole-number ratios -- e.g. 1:1, 2:1, 3:2 etc. Thus if the atoms always combined in the same ratio for a given compound and the atoms of the different elements always had the same mass, then the ratio of the masses that combined was always the same. E.g. 8 g of oxygen always reacts with exactly 1 g of hydrogen to form water. 23 g of sodium always reacts with exactly 35.5 g of chlorine to form sodium chloride. 23 g of sodium reacts with 8 g of oxygen to form sodium oxide. And so on. Facts like these could be explained if hydrogen atoms each weighed 1 g, oxygen atoms weighed 8 g, and they combined in a 1:1 ratio. Or O atoms weighed 16 g and they combined in a 2 :1 hydrogen:oxygen ratio (which we now know to be the case). Or, indeed if H atoms weighed 1 millionth of a gram and O atoms weighed 16 millionths of a gram and they combined in a 2 million:1 million ratio (again 2:1). In fact H atoms weigh far less than 1 millionth of a gram, but so long as the H : O mass ratio is 1 : 16 and the combining ratio is 2:1, the 8:1 mass ratio will hold no matter how much material we react -- 8 tons of O will always react exactly with 1 ton of H. Equally important, Daltons theory also explained the law of multiple proportions by suggesting that a given type of atom might have more than one combining ratio. For the case of carbon and oxygen, we can have CO and CO2, and the combining weights work out if C weighs 12 somethings and O weighs 16 somethings. Dalton's atomic theory explained everything that was discovered about combining masses of the chemical elements since his time (and indeed up to today). The question then turned to issues of why the atoms had the properties they did. Why do O atoms always weigh almost exactly 16 times as much as a H atom? Na atoms 23 times the H atom? C atoms 12 times H? And why the fixed combining ratios -- 2:1 for H and O, 1:1 for Na and Cl, etc? In other words, scientists

started to enquire about the structure of the atom, to explain why atoms differed. This line of questions, starting around Dalton's time, continued till the late 1920's when the questions relevant to chemistry were essentially completely answered. Atomic structure The first interesting suggestion came from an English physician, William Prout in 1816. Prouts hypothesis suggested that the fundamental, indivisible building block of atoms was the H atom, and that all other atoms were built up from combinations of H atoms. That would explain the wholenumber mass ratios known at the time: if H = 1, then C = 12, O = 16 . This was the first speculation about structure within the atom -- a line of enquiry that continues to this day. and one that makes Prout one of my favorites in chemical history how audacious an idea at that time, and how close he was to being almost exactly correct. Unfortunately Prout's hypothesis (a hypothesis is an untested theory) ran into the awkward fact that more accurate measrement showed that chlorine (Cl) atoms are almost exactly 35.5 times the H mass, and copper (Cu) atoms are 63.5 times the H mass (to have a H atom in Prout's idea just destroys the elegance of the concept). As measurements became more accurate, more fractional atomic masses were discovered. Look inside the front cover of your text book: B is 10.81, Ge is 72.64, Pb is 207.2, etc.) So Prouts idea was sidelined until about 1896 when what later turned out to be the right answer was suggested: there can be two types of Cl atom, one type with a mass 35 times the H mass and the other 37 times the H mass, and they are found in nature in a constant ratio of 3:1. So the mass of 35.5 that we measure is just an average: [(3 x 35) + (1 x 37]/4 = 35.5). The existence of atoms with identical properties but different masses was proved in 1913. We call these isotopes of an element. Many elements have two or more stable isotopes (isotopes that are not radioactive). Hydrogen has two, oxygen three, tin (the record holder) has ten isotopes. In this way all of the strange, non-wholenumber atomic masses of the elements can be explained -- all of the isotopes have masses that are almost exactly whole-number multiples of the mass of the lightest hydrogen isotope (the other H isotope, called deuterium, is twice as heavy, but only 0.02% of normal hydrogen, so the average atomic weight is close to 1). The mass spectrometer (invented in 1913 and much improved by Aston after WW I) is the instrument that revealed the rich isotopic structure of the world, and Astons demonstration of the whole number rule (essentially confirming Prouts hypothesis) brought him the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1922. Electrical particles in the atom a) Enabling technology: the electric battery

Meanwhile, in the late 1890's and the early 1900's, other technology developments enabled a different line of research to probing the structural aspect of the atom that gives rise to the fixed and simple combining ratios that Dalton had noted. Scientists were playing (often literally successful research is so much fun it is just like play) with the effects of electricity on substances. The electric battery had been invented by the Italian Alessandro Volta around 1800. (Volta was very interested in the effects of electricity on the nerves in the body. You can detect a 1-2 volt potential difference from a single battery cell by placing wires from the battery terminals on the top and bottom of your tongue -- try it. Or even better, touch one wire to a metal tooth filling -- ouch! At about 10 volts, one wire on the tongue and another touching your closed eyelid will produce a sensation of light flashes. At about 50 volts, your fingers are a detector. Volta was extremely

interested in this interplay between electricity and sensation but decided to stop after experiencing the sensation of placing wires carrying about 50 volts into his ears!) Prior to Voltas invention, the only source of electricity was static electricity the sort that you experience from friction scuffling your feet on the carpet, or getting out of the car on a dry day and getting a shock when you touch something metal. Although such shocks can often involve 1000 volts or more, static electricity involves only very tiny currents and a large part of the useful application of electricity comes in the flow of significant amounts of current. [Incidentally, Voltas invention came in part from an argument he was having with an Italian colleague, Luigi Galvani. Some of you may remember that Galvani made the famous observation when dissecting a dead frog that the frogs leg would twitch when he touched a nerve point with his scalpel. Galvani speculated that the frog was somehow producing an animal electricity; Volta didnt believe this and instead suggested that the effect arose from the contact of dissimilar metals the steel scalpel, the copper sheeting that covered the dissecting table and built his first battery, or Voltaic pile out of copper and zinc discs separated by a brine-soaked piece of paper, showing that an electric potential could be generated without any animal intervention. Notwithstanding the science, the idea that you could electrically stimulate nerves in dead animals led to very popular science demonstrations to the public in those pre-cinema, pre-TV days. Science showmen found that they could stimulate the tails of dead dogs to wag, or dead cats to meow. Moving to more dramatic effects, some started to play with the bodies of freshly-executed human criminals (the rules were different then). If they stimulated the right nerves in the armpit, the corpses arm would raise; stimulate the right nerves in the diaphragm and it would contract causing the corpse to emit a shuddering groan; if you can hit the right nerves controlling the stomach muscles, you could make the torso start to rise up off the table. You can imagine the effect on an audience. Mary Shelleys novel, Frankenstein, written in 1818 was inspired by such demonstrations.] Very soon after Volta's discovery made a cheap source of electric potential and current available, scientists discovered that certain chemical compounds could be decomposed by passing an electric current through them. It was as though the substances contained atoms with different electric charges (positive and negative) which were attracted, respectively, to the negatively and positivelycharged electrodes. (We get the idea of positive and negative charge from Benjamin Franklin.) A number of new elements were first separated from their compounds using this new process of electrolysis; sodium, for example was first prepared as a metal by electrolysis of molten sodium chloride by Sir Humphrey Davy in England. Later in the century, a young American chemistry undergraduate, Charles Hall, invented an electrolytic process for producing aluminum from bauxite ore and became very rich. The company Hall founded, now Alcoa, still uses the Hall process. Davys assistant and later successor, Michael Faraday, sometimes argued to be the greatest of all scientists, followed up these electrolysis experimenst, placing great emphasis on weighing the amount of product produced for a given amount of electrical charge, and found that, for example, electrolysis of water produced 1 g of hydrogen for the passage of 96,500 coulombs of electric charge (an amount now called the faraday, F). Well return to this ratio of charge to mass shortly. b) Enabling technology: the vacuum pump and high voltage electrical supplies

By about 1890, invention of vacuum pumps had led to the discovery that an electric current could also be passed through a gas if a sufficiently high voltage was applied with the gas at a low enough pressure, making the gas glow and creating a discharge (a neon tube is a good example). By the same argument, it looked as if the atoms of the gas also were made up of positively and negatively charged pieces that could be torn apart. The negative bits of the atoms made the glass of the discharge tube glow when they struck it. They were called cathode rays because they appeared to move away from the negative electrode or cathode. This discovery was the beginning of the cathode ray tube used in almost all TV sets until the rise of flat panel technology. Work on the negative pieces showed that they were very light particles, and always had the same mass no matter what the gas. These particles were given the name electrons by J.J. Thompson at Cambridge University who devised a way to measure the ratio of charge to mass for these particles. Thompson found that the ratio of charge to mass for these electrons was almost 2000 times greater than the charge-to-mass ratio found by Faraday for electrolytic production of hydrogen, and made the correct deduction that the charge on the electron was the same magnitude (but opposite sign) as the charge on hydrogen ions in an acid solution, but that the mass of the electron was ~ 2000 times smaller than the hydrogen atom i.e the electron is a subatomic particle. The positive pieces left behind when electrons were torn off the atoms of the different gases had different masses that were comparable to the atomic masses of the gas. In particular, hydrogen atoms could be torn apart into electrons and positively charged particles which were given the name protons. The mass of the proton was almost 2000 times greater than the electron mass. Their electric charge was exactly equal to the electron mass but opposite in sign. Isotopes (and the vindication of William Prout) J.J. Thompson in 1913 discovered that the positive rays from neon gas appeared to have TWO charge/mass ratios, one corresponding to mass 20 (times the H mass) and one at 22. At left is Thompsons result: note the faint additional streak corresponding to the neon-22 isotope (written 22Ne), about 10% of 20Ne.

So Dalton was not quite correct atoms of an element CAN differ in mass though not in chemical properties. And Prouts idea proved visionary atoms are indeed built up from elementary particles with the mass of the hydrogen nucleus except that roughly half the particles are neutral (neutrons) and so add mass without disturbing the electrical properties of the atom, which turn out to determine the chemical behavior. So now, a picture of the structure of the atom begins to emerge, with equal numbers of positive protons and negative electrons, held together by electrostatic attraction (opposite charges attract). The next (and key) question to be answered was how the electrons and protons were arranged in the atom. This arrangement turns out to be the key to chemistry. Arrangement of protons and electrons in the atom By about 1905, scientists had a vague idea of atoms as something like a watermelon (without the rind) with electrons as the pulp and protons as the seeds embedded throughout the structure. But how to tell if this was true? The unlikely tool to answer this question had been discovered in 1896. X-rays The scientific event of the decade, perhaps of the century, in 1896 had been Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X-rays. This was another product of playing with cathode rays. Roentgen discovered that as well as making the glass of the discharge tube glow with visible light, the cathode rays also made the glass emit invisible radiation that would pass through materials, including his hand. He immediately realized the medical implications of his discovery and news spread rapidly throughout Europe. (Roentgen was awarded the first Nobel prize in Physics in 1901). X-rays turn out to be electromagnetic radiation (like light) but of very short wavelength. Radioactivity In Paris, Henri Bequerel wanted to make a similar discovery. He knew that some materials phosphoresce -- emit light for some time after they have been exposed to light (like glow-in-thedark Frisbees, not yet invented) and was checking to see if these materials would give off X-rays. One of his substances was a compound of uranium, and he left this sitting on top of a photographic plate in a drawer for several days because it was too rainy (no sun) to do his experiment. The uranium emitted something that blackened the photogtraphic plate even without prior exposure to light. Bequerel had discovered radioactivity (and won the Physics Nobel prize in 1903). Rushing to experiment with this new phenomenon, scientists found three types of emission from radioactive materials -- labelled alpha (" ), beta ($ ) and gamma (( ) rays. The ( -rays were like X-rays, of even shorter wavelength. The $ -rays were electrons, and the " -rays turned out to be very fast helium atoms stripped of two electrons. The latter was demonstrated around 1906 by a young physicist from New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford, then working at McGill University in Montreal, by the simple experiment of allowing " -rays to pass through a thin glass window into an evacuated glass flask and then after a few weeks striking an electrical discharge in the tube and identifying the characteristic spectrum of helium gas.

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Discovery of the nucleus Having demonstrated that " -rays were fast He nuclei, Ernest Rutherford began to use them as projectiles to probe the internal structure of the atom (again an enabling technology) . The idea is similar to shooting a BB gun at the watermelon -- the seeds or protons are somewhat lighter than the BB pellet, so even if it hits one, it won't bounce back but just be deflected. But what Rutherford's students saw in shooting at gold atoms in a very thin foil was that every so often, about once in 10,000 tries, an " -particle would bounce straight back. If this happened with the watermelon, you would probably conclude that someone had stuck a rock or a heavy ball bearing in the center of the melon. In the same way, Rutherford concluded that the protons in the gold atom must all be grouped together in a heavy mass in the center of the atom. The fact that 9,999 out of 10,000 " -particles went right through the gold foil without being deflected meant that most of the atom was empty space, inhabited only by the very light electrons. Rutherford named the central, small heavy region of the atom the nucleus (like the nucleus of a cell). The idea of the atom then changed to something like a minute planetary system, with the negative electrons somehow whirling in orbits around the central positve nucleus containing all the protons. However, the mass of the nucleus was more than could be explained by just the protons. E.g. the He atom has 2 protons, but the He atom mass is 4 times the H atom mass. Rutherford and others speculated that another heavy particle made up the additional mass. This particle was discovered in 1932 and named the neutron. Neutrons weigh almost the same as protons, but have no electric charge; the He nucleus has 2 protons and 2 neutrons giving a mass of about 4. The existence of the neutron is what allows different isotopes of an element to exist. For example, nature can make a nucleus with 2 protons but only 1 neutron. Because changing the number of neutrons in the nucleus does not change the nuclear charge, the number of electrons (which must equal the number of protons) doesn't change. It is the number of electrons that determines the chemical properties of an atom as we shall see, so this atom is also an isotope of He -- helium-3 or 3He.

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Some terminology: Atomic number (Z): number of protons in nucleus: determines number of electrons so determines the chemical identity of the atom Mass number (A): sum of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Atoms with the same atomic number but different mass numbers are isotopes of the same element Number of neutrons in the nucleus = mass number - atomic number Atomic masses Finding the absolute mass, of anything -- an atom, a potato -- to very high accuracy is a tough job. Finding the accurate relative mass of two objects is much easier. So for atoms, it's easiest to choose a reference atom and measure masses relative to that reference standard. The hydrogen atom itself turns out not to be a useful standard, and instead scientists have agreed to define the mass of the 12C isotope (6 protons, 6 neutrons) of carbon as exactly 12. Then the unit of atomic mass is 1/12 of the 12C mass, and is known simply as the unit (symbol, "u"). The hydrogen atom (1H) has a mass of 1.008 u on this scale. The Mole, and molar masses Because atoms are so small, any quantity of a substance we can physically handle -- e.g. pick up on a spatula, suck up into a pipette -- will contain an enormous number of atoms. For example, 1 microgram of gold (an amount about the size of a flake of dandruff) contains about 3 x 1015 (three thousand trillion) gold atoms. But it is enormously convenient to think of chemical reactions in terms of the numbers of atoms or molecules reacting with each other. For example, for the reaction of hydrogen with oxygen to form water, we write: 2H2 + O2 6 2H2O -- meaning exactly two molecules of hydrogen react with exactly one molecule of oxygen to form exactly 2 molecules of water. So when we want to carry out reactions economically, we would usually like to bring together exactly the right numbers of each type of atom or molecule. But atoms are too small to handle individually, and too numerous to count. The only handle we have is that we know that each type of atom has a characteristic mass. So if we know that mass -- in grams, say -- and we know how many grams we have then we know how many atoms we have. For example, a hydrogen molecule weighs 3.2 x 10-24g. An oxygen molecule weighs 5.1 x 10-23 g. Knowing these weights it's fairly simple arithmetic to calculate how many grams of hydrogen we'd need to have exactly twice as many hydrogen molecules as there are oxygen molecules in, say, 32 g of oxygen. But it's still a bit of a pain. To make things easier, we can work out a conversion constant between the atomic mass scale (where a hydrogen atom weighs almost exactly 1.0 atomic mass unit, or 1"u") and the gram scale. It turns out that 1.0 u is equal to 1.6 x 10-24g (to 2 significant figures). So how many hydrogen atoms (mass ~ 1.0 u) in 1 gram of hydrogen? The answer is (1.0 u/H atom)/(1.6 x 10-24 g/u) which is 6.0 x 1023 H atoms/g. [Notice how factor analysis helps get the right conversion.]

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What about oxygen? An oxygen atom weighs 16.0 u on the atomic scale, or ~ 2.6 x 10-23 g. How many oxygen atoms in 16.0 g of oxygen? Answer: 16/2.6 x 10-23 which is 6.0 x 1023. Again! There's a pattern here. Take the mass of an atom, or molecule, on the atomic scale, write the same number in grams (when I was in high school, in 19XX, this used to be called the gramatomic or the gram-molecular weight of a substance), and the number of atoms or molecules contained in that mass of the substance is ALWAYS 6.0 x 1023. This number is known as Avogadro's Number. Because "Avogadro's number" is sort of a mouthful, we give the number a simpler name -- the mole. Why do we work in grams rather than SI units of mass (kilograms)? That's because these ideas were all worked out long before there was agreement to standardize on SI units, when the gram was the basic unit of mass. It turns out not to matter. The number of hydrogen atoms in 1.0 kg of hydrogen is the same as the number of oxygen atoms in 16.0 kg of oxygen (6.0 x 1026). Or the number of H atoms in 1 tonne (1000 kg) of hydrogen is the same as the number of oxygen atoms in 16 tonnes of oxygen (work that one out for yourself). It's knowing that a given number of oxygen atoms weighs 16 times as much as the same number of hydrogen atoms that's the important fact. For convenience (and economy) in the laboratory, we are usually working with quantities of material measured in grams, so the definition of the mole has remained tied to gram amounts. The mole is simply a very large number, appropriate for counting atoms, which are always very numerous. Back to the hydrogen-oxygen reaction: If I take 4.0 g of hydrogen, this will contain 2 moles of H2 molecules (mass 2.0 u per molecule on the atomic mass scale) or 1.2 x 1024 molecules. Oxygen molecules weigh 32 u, so 1 mole of O2 weighs 32g and contains 6.0 x 1023 molecules. So 4.0 g of H2 will react exactly with 32g of O2 in a ratio of 2 H2 molecules for each O2. This procedure works perfectly for doing chemical reactions accurately. The masses of the reactants and products in grams are always proportional to the masses of the reacting atoms and molecules in atomic mass units and the conversion factor is always the same: 1.0 u = 1.6 x 10-24g; 1 g = 6.0 x 1023 u. I.e. 1 g is equivalent to 1 mole of "u"'s. Concept summary Matter is composed of atoms. These have a structure (tiny, massive central nucleus, surrounded by a "cloud" of electrons). The nucleus contains protons and neutrons; the number of protons (atomic number) determines the nuclear charge, hence the number of electrons (to balance that charge), hence the chemical behavior of the atom. Total number of protons + neutrons determines the atomic mass. Atoms combine chemically with each other in fixed (often simple) proportions determined by their electronic structure. Weighing the amount of an element or compound is equivalent to counting the atoms (because atomic masses are known), and so allows chemical reactions to be carried out quantitatively.

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Mastery check You should be able to: -- determine the numbers of protons, neutrons and electrons in an atom, given the element symbol or atomic number and the mass number. -- easily convert between grams, moles and numbers of atoms or molecules. -- using these conversions you should be able to do simple calculations You should be able to match scientists names with the discoveries they made, and enabling technologies with the discoveries they enabled.

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