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Paragraph on john dalton atomic theory
Atomic structure and theory
Paragraph on john dalton atomic theory
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The initial idea of the existence of an atom began during the 5th Century. The Greek philosopher, Democritus devised a theory of an atom and suggested four elements namely; earth, water, air, and fire, which consist of atoms held tightly together. During the start of the 19th century, John Dalton devised a number of theories explaining the existence of atoms. He concurred with the previous work of Democritus and suggested that atoms compose indivisible elements. For centuries, humankind has undertaken a number of experiments and researches to understand the basic properties of matter. People have always questioned the existence of different substances on earth. During this time, a number of explanations rose explaining how matter constitutes tiny particles or atoms. Early scientists believed that atoms combined in different forms to create current and any future kinds of matter.
Chemical background for early atomic structure established that in a chemical reaction, a mass neither forms nor is it destroyed. In explaining this concept, a law of conservation of mass emerged. The law states that any chemical reaction of substances results to creation of new substances, but the total weight of the subsequent products remains same as the total weight of reacted substances. Another law became famous, the law of constant composition, which states that elements in a compound exists in a fixed and equal quantity by mass, irrespective of the source of the compound or preparation method. In today’s world, scientists understand that atoms make up molecules and are the tinniest parts of an element. Atoms consist of electrons, neutrons, and protons. Electrons consist of empty spaces and scientists refer the as elementary. Protons and neutrons...
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...tron in relation to the atom and every aspect connected to the spectra. The neutron discovery enhanced the picture of the atom making it complete.
21st century marked the discovery and solving of many issues of individual atomic structure and behaviour. These turned the attention for the study to smaller and large-scale atomic nucleus study. The study of smaller scale atomic nucleus determines details of atomic structures and development of sources of energy from atomic nuclear fusion. This suggests that the atom is separable and can undergo a number of alterations as opposed to earlier studies. Larger scale studies and discoveries determine the behaviour of large groups of atoms such as nature and the relations between numbers of elementary particles discovered. These new particles have already made brand types of exotic atoms such as muonium and positronium.
In "Energy Story" uses an explanation of atoms and tells us the parts of an atom and its structure. In the text it
The development of atomic bomb boosted the level of understanding in terms of physics and chemistry of that particular time period. Physicists started to realize that stable nuclei can be converted to unstable nuclei. Through such process, they discovered that heavy nuclei can undergo nuclear fission. While testing, they added a neutron to an isotope of Uranium 235. This resulted Uranium 235 to become unstable and break down into Barium and Krypton, releasing two to three more neutrons. The breakdown of Uranium 235 is called “fission”. When the released neutrons attach to other isotopes of Uranium 235, this can result in a chain reaction of fission. For every generation of fission, the amount of fission is doubled, and this resulted in an extreme outburst of energy. The amount of energy released by this process is related to Einstein’s famous equation “E=mc^2” (Wolf).
This showed that dissolved gases were mechanically mixed with the water and weren?t mixed naturally. But in 1803 it was found that this depended on the weight of the individual particles of the gas or atoms. By assuming the particles were the same size, Dalton was able to develop the idea of atomic weights. In 1803 this theory was finalised and stated that (1) all matter is made up of the smallest possible particles termed atoms, (2) atoms of a given element have unique characteristics and weight, and (3) three types of atoms exist: simple (elements), compound (simple molecules), and complex (complex molecules).
An atom, by definition, is the smallest part of any substance. The atom has three main components that make it up: protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are within the nucleus in the center of the atom. The electrons revolve around the nucleus in many orbitals. These orbitals consist of many different shapes, including circular, spiral, and many others. Protons are positively charged and electrons are negatively charged. Protons and electrons both have charge of equal magnitude (i.e. 1.602x10-19 coulombs). Neutrons have a neutral charge, and they, along with protons, are the majority of mass in an atom. Electron mass, though, is negligible. When an atom has a neutral charge, it is stable.
Dalton’s atomic theory, which stated “the atoms were tiny, indivisible, indestructible particles” (Bender), differed drastically from that of the Greeks’ in that it “wasn’t just a philosophical statement that there are atoms because there must be atoms” (Bender). Although Aristotle believed that there are four terrestrial elements, earth, water, air, and fire, Democratus believed that “a piece of a substance can be divided into smaller pieces of that substance until we get down to a fundamental level at which you can’t divide the substance up and still have pieces of that substance” (“Atoms”). Aristotle’s theory was popular, but incorrect; Democratus’s was closer to our current theory, yet he remained relatively unpopular and obscure. This demonstrates of the key way in which a personal point of view can, in fact, retard the pursuit of knowledge. The scientist with the better oratory abilities has his theories more widely accepted. Dalton’s own theory, which extrapolated upon four basic
The amazing transformation the study of physics underwent in the two decades following the turn of the 20th century is a well-known story. Physicists, on the verge of declaring the physical world “understood”, discovered that existing theories failed to describe the behavior of the atom. In a very short time, a more fundamental theory of the ...
Attempts to organize the elements began in the late 1800’s. At this time, about sixty elements were known. Much advancement would have been impossible if the basic model of the atom was discovered. Great progress came from Dmitri Medeleev – a Russian chemist. His first draft of a periodic table was only the product of him attempting to summarize his knowledge of the elements. Although not all of Medeleev’s ideas were one-hundred percent accurate, they created a solid base to build upon. Marie and Pierre Curie; a married couple from Paris were successors of Medeleev. Their interests were radioactivity and discovered radium. The true pioneers of the periodic table were Ernest Rutherford and James Chadwick. Rutherford formed the hypothesis that, “An atom must have a concentrated positive center charge that contains most of the atom’s mass.” Following Rutherford, Chadwick exposed a segment of the nucleus that was had no charge: the neutron. With the basic knowledge of the structure of an atom, the tedious work of putting the rest of the puzzle together continued.
The Atomic Theory began in roughly 400BC with Democritus in Ancient Greece and is universally believed to be correct today. Democritus who was born in 460 BC and died 370 BC and is known as the father of modern science. Democritus proclaimed that everything is made up of atoms. He continued his theory to say that atoms will always be in motion, between atoms there is empty space, atoms are unbreakable, there are an infinite number of atoms all different sizes and shapes. He also said that iron atoms are solid and strong and have hooks to lock them together, water atoms are smooth and slippery, salt atoms have sharp jagged edges because of its taste and air atoms are light and spiralling.
Now, matter can be understood to be composed of molecules in which are composed of atoms. Where as before, matter was simply understood to be composed of atoms. Technology advancements have been able to depict smaller particles held within atoms that was not available in Dalton’s time, according to ABCTE. Within the three thousand years of Dalton’s atomic theory and the modern era’s theory there has been little change. To conclude upon, Democritus, Aristotle, and John Dalton all shared agreements and disagreements of what atoms pertained to, but in the end, all three was key factors in the development of the atomic theory known
Things are very different from each other, and can be broken down into small groups inside itself, which was then noticed early by people, and Greek thinkers, about 400BC. Which just happened to use words like "element', and `atom' to describe the many different parts and even the smallest parts of matter. These ideas were around for over 2000 years while ideas such as `Elements' of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water to explain `world stuff' came and went. Much later, Boyle, an experimenter like Galileo and Bacon, was influenced much by Democritus, Gassendi, and Descartes, which lent much important weight to the atomic theory of matter in the 1600s. Although it was Lavoisier who had divided the very few elements known in the 1700's into four different classes, and then John Dalton made atoms even more believable, telling everyone that the mass of an atom was it's most important property. Then in the early 1800's Dobereiner noted that the similar elements often had relative atomic masses, and DeChancourtois made a cylindrical table of elements to display the periodic reoccurrence of properties. Cannizaro then determined atomic weights for the 60 or so elements known in the 1860s, and then a table was arranged by Newlands, with the many elements given a serial number in order of their atomic weights, of course beginning with Hydrogen. That made it clear that "the eighth element, starting from a given one, is a kind of a repeat of the first", which Newlands called the Law of Octaves.
The writings of some Greek philosophers may be considered to be among the very first chemical theories, such as the theory that all things are composed of air, earth, fire, and water. Each of these were represented by different elements, such as sulfur, salt, mercury, and, ideally, gold. Other ideas held by alchemists were that each of the known elements were represented by heavenly bodies. Gold was earth's representation of the sun, silver for the moon, mercury for the planet Mercury, copper for Venus, iron for Mars, tin for Jupiter, and lead for Saturn.
The next big step in the discovery of the atom was the scientific test that proved the existence of the atom. After the discovery of the atom we had the discovery of subatomic particles. With the discovery of the subatomic particles came the research, which came from experiments that were made to find out more about the subatomic particles. This research is how we uncovered that most of the weight of an atom is from its nucleus. With the gold foil experiment, tested by Ernest Rutherford, he discovered the existence of the positively charged nucleus. He proved this when the experiment was happening, a small fraction of the photons th...
Many different scientists contributed to the atomic theory. Every single one of them played an important role in creating the atomic theory known today. Around 400 BCE Leucippus was the scientist who originally thought of the atomic theory. Democritus adopted the ideas of Leucippus, his mentor. Democritus soon developed the idea of an atom. Democritus believed everything was made up tiny particles of matter called atoms. He chose this name because in Greek atom means indivisible. After Democritus Isaac Newton was the next scientist to contribute to the atomic theory. Isaac Newton began to realize that atoms were constantly moving and not stationary. In 1803 John Dalton added to the atomic theory. Dalton’s atomic theory was composed of five
Dalton was the first person to develop a scientific atom theory, the ancient Greeks had ideas about the atom but could not prove it scientifically.
Scientists from earlier times helped influence the discoveries that lead to the development of atomic energy. In the late 1800’s, Dalton created the Atomic Theory which explains atoms, elements and compounds (Henderson 1). This was important to the study of and understanding of atoms to future scientists. The Atomic Theory was a list of scientific laws regarding atoms and their potential abilities. Roentagen, used Dalton’s findings and discovered x-rays which could pass through solid objects (Henderson 1). Although he did not discover radiation from the x-rays, he did help lay the foundations for electromagnetic waves. Shortly after Roentagen’s findings, J.J. Thompson discovered the electron which was responsible for defining the atom’s characteristics (Henderson 2). The electron helped scientists uncover why an atom responds to reactions the way it does and how it received its “personality”. Dalton’s, Roentagen’s and Thompson’s findings helped guide other scientists to discovering the uses of atomic energy and reactions. Such applications were discovered in the early 1900’s by using Einstein’s equation, which stated that if a chain reaction occurred, cheap, reliable energy could b...