THE IDEAS ABOUT ATOM AND ATOMIC MODEL

ANCIENT GREEK
At the very end of the 19th century that technology became
advanced enough to allow scientists a glimpse of the atom’s constituent part:
the electron, nucleus, proton, and neutron.

The idea that all matter is made up of tiny, indivisible particles, or

atoms, is believed to have originated with the Greek philosopher Leucippus
of Miletus and his student Democritus of Abdera in the 5th century B.C. (The
word atom comes from the Greek word atomos, which means “indivisible.”)

1.All matter consists of invisible particles called atoms.

2.Atoms are indestructible.

3.Atoms are solid but invisible 4.Atoms are homogenous.

Rutherford overturned Thomson's

model in 1911 with his well-known gold foil
experiment in which he demonstrated that the
atom has a tiny and heavy nucleus. Rutherford
designed an experiment to use the alpha
particles emitted by a radioactive element as
probes to the unseen world of atomic
structure. If Thomson was correct, the beam
would go straight through the gold foil. Most
of the beams went through the foil, but a few
were deflected.

Rutherford presented his own physical model for subatomic structure, as an interpretation for
the unexpected experimental results. In it, the atom is made up of a central charge (this is the modern
atomic nucleus, though Rutherford did not use the term "nucleus" in his paper) surrounded by a cloud
of (presumably) orbiting electrons. In this May 1911 paper, Rutherford only committed himself to a
small central region of very high positive or negative charge in the atom.

HENRY MOSELEY
Experimenting with the energy of beta particles in
1912, Moseley showed that high potentials were
attainable from a radioactive source of radium,
thereby inventing the first atomic battery, though
he was unable to produce the 1MeV necessary to
stop the particles.

Before Moseley and his law, atomic

numbers had been thought of as a semi-arbitrary
ordering number, vaguely increasing with atomic
weight but not strictly defined by it. Moseley's
discovery showed that atomic numbers were not
arbitrarily assigned, but rather, they have a definite
physical basis. Moseley postulated that each
successive element has a nuclear charge exactly one
unit greater than its predecessor. Moseley redefined the idea of atomic numbers from its previous
status as an ad hoc numerical tag to help sorting the elements into an exact sequence of ascending
atomic numbers that made the Periodic Table exact.

NIELS BOHR
The discoveries of the electron and
radioactivity at the end of the 19th century led to
different models for the structure of the atom. In
1913, Niels Bohr proposed a theory for the
hydrogen atom based on quantum theory that
energy is transferred only in certain well defined
quantities. Electrons should move around the
nucleus but only in prescribed orbits. When
jumping from one orbit to another with lower
energy, a light quantum is emitted. Bohr's theory
could explain why atoms emitted light in fixed
wavelengths.