Atomic History

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Since the age of lore, the human mind has always reached out to find an explanation for all phenomena in which it was surrounded. A constant insight into nature and an awareness of being has always been necessary. Ever since then, the arms of the brain, starting off as fetal, reached out and set roots in atomic theory- all the way up until they became strong, vascular, and rigid with experimentation and specific classification of what life is based upon. Furthermore, the development of four elements called “roots”, from the Grecian philosopher Empedocles, became the basis for further experiments; thus leading to Post Socratic philosophies on the matter of matter and what it is composed of, and served as a fertile foundation for Alchemy which served as a foundation for all chemistry to follow.

The insight, spoken of in the latter paragraph, is an incomparably magnificent thing. The insight of the alchemists of approximately five hundred B.C.E can also be quite intriguing. But what was alchemy? The familiar response is that alchemists believed that if they were able to create the Philosopher’s Stone, or lapis philosorum, that they would be able to make themselves have eternal live, or complete the proverbial quest for fortune by trans-mutating base metals into precious metals such as gold, silver, or bronze by combining together precise amounts of tin, lead, or other substances. Typically, people focus on these things when it comes to discussing alchemy, but besides the transformations executed and the magic performed, wasn’t it just a spiritual quest in a psychoanalytic form to make sense of the universe. It follows that Alchemy could have been taken up at any time in the span of civilization, or by any one person and ...

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...xactly the same weight. (Dalton mistakenly used the word weight instead of mass, and ever since then, chemists have referred to this amount as atomic weight instead of mass.) In modern atomic chemistry, scientists have resolved this third postulate to say that elements are classified by the nuclear charge of their atoms because the mass of an atom does slightly differ from the next within an element and therefore is not perfectly precise. Furthermore, John Dalton concluded that when elements react, their atoms combine in simple, whole number ratios. By stating this, he was attempting to explain the phenomena which occurred within atomic compound in accordance to their weight. Dalton’s last correct law of atomism basically expanded on his fourth by saying that when elements react, their elements occasionally combine in more than one simple, whole number ratios.

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