The Complications Of Democritus

Democritus was a Greek philosopher who lived between 470-380 B.C. He developed the concept of the 'atom', which in Greek mean indivisible. Democritus have made many very important discoveries in his lifetime but the greatest was about the atom. Democritus believed that if you tried to cut matter into the smallest pieces possible, you would eventually get a very small particle that is indestructible and could not be cut. So Democritus did his first experiment by getting seashell and break it in half. He then took that half and broke it in half over and over and over again, until he was finally left with a fine powder. He then took the smallest piece from the powder and tried to break it again but he could not break it anymore. And that’s also

His first experiment was to build a cathode ray tube with a metal cylinder on the end. This cylinder had two slits in it, leading to electrometers, which could measure small electric charges. In the late 19 Thomson began to experiment it with cathode ray tubes. Cathode ray tubes are sealed glass tubes from which most of the air has been evacuated. A high voltage is applied across two electrodes at one end of the tube, which causes a beam of particles to flow from the cathode, the negatively charged electrode to the anode of the positively-charged electrode. The tubes are called cathode ray tubes because the particle beam or cathode ray originates at the cathode. The ray can be detected by painting a material known as phosphors onto the far end of the tube beyond the anode. The phosphors spark, or emit light, when impacted by the cathode ray. This experiment led him to fins that by applying a magnetic field across the tube, there will not be activity recorded by the electrometers and so the charge will have to bend away by the magnet. This proved that the negative charge and the ray were inseparable and intertwined.

A closed chamber with transparent sides is fitted with two parallel metal plates, which acquire a positive or negative charge when an electric current is applied. At the start of the experiment, an atomizer sprays a fine mist of oil droplets into the upper portion of the chamber. Under the influence of gravity and air resistance, some of the oil droplets fall through a small hole cut in the top metal plate. When the space between the metal plates is ionized by radiation, electrons from the air attach themselves to the falling oil droplets, causing them to acquire a negative charge. A light source, set at right angles to a viewing microscope, illuminates the oil droplets and makes them appear as bright stars while they fall. The mass of a single charged droplet can be calculated by observing how fast it falls. By adjusting the potential difference, or voltage, between the metal plates, the speed of the droplet’s motion can be increased or decreased; when the amount of upward electric force equals the known downward gravitational force, the charged droplet remains stationary. The amount of voltage needed to suspend a droplet is used along with its mass to determine the overall electric charge on the droplet. Through repeated application of this method, the values of the electric charge on individual oil drops are always whole-number multiples of a lowest value that value being the elementary electric charge itself. From the time