The Physics Of Chemistry Class - 1240 Words

In Chemistry class, the one word you will hear repeatedly is the atom. But in the beginning, it was never this way. Before people had a rough idea what things were made up of, we all thought objects were made up of the four elements: water, earth, fire, and air. This thought was given to us by Aristotle, who was a popular philosopher and scientist in 322 B.C. Then one day, a man named Democritus proclaimed that every substance is made up of tiny, indivisible particles. The Greek said that these particles were called â€Å"atomon†, and they all varied in shape depending on their properties. But this idea was rejected by leading philosophers at the time, which was around 400 B.C. Flash forward to 1897, we have a British physicist by the†¦show more content†¦Later on in the 20th century came a man named Earnest Rutherford. This physicist conducted an experiment that is widely known in the chemistry world: the gold-foil experiment. The experiment went like this: there was an alpha particle source that would pass through gold foil in a vacuum. The outcome of this experiment was that the particle went through, but went in different directions. This forced Rutherford to conclude that an atom was much more than just open space with scattered electrons, showing that Thomson’s â€Å"Plum Pudding Model† to be inaccurate. Rutherford had also concluded that an atom must have a positively charged center that contained most of it’s atomic mass. Rutherford was a major contribution to chemistry, discovering the nucleus and the proton. Rutherford’s discovery helped other scientists by his discovery. English physicist James Chadwick, for example. When Rutherford proposed that an electron and a proton could combine together to make a neutral particle, it came to the question what else was in a nucleus addition to protons. But there was no evidence of this. Another experiment had caught Chadwick’s attention: an experiment by Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie. The pair had studied the radiation from beryllium as it hit a paraffin wax target. The couple had found that the radiation hit the protons, causing them to be knocked loose from hydrogen atoms in that target. The protons also recoiled with a high velocity. They