How did they figure out what was inside an atom?

Answer 1

through experementation, the major people were

Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was the son of James and Martha Rutherford. He was born in Spring Grove, New Zealand. Earnest studied at Havelock College and then went on to study at Nelson College where he won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College. He then went on to England to study at the University of Cambridge.

In 1898 he went to study physics in Montreal, Canada, where he did work that led him to receiving the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His most famous experiment was the gold foil experiment (also known as the Geiger-Marsden experiment).

In this experiment Ernest took very thin sheets of gold foil and caused alpha particles to flow towards the foil. He expected the particles to flow through and spread out a little bit because scientists only knew of electrons (negativley charged particles) at the time and the alpha paricles were positively charged.

What really happened was, most of the particles flowed straight through although every once in a while one would bounce off.

He concluded that there must be a very strong, dense, positive charge in the middle of each atom.

We now know today that if the very strong, dense, positive charge (nucleus) is the size of a mable than the whole atom would be bigger than a football field.

Joseph John Thomson

Joseph John Thomson was born in 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England. In 1870 he attended the Universtiy of Manchester (Owen's College) and studied engineering. In 1880 he moved to Trinity College in Cambridge. In 1884 he became a Proffessor of Physics. One of his most famous students was Earnest Rutherford, who would later take over Thomson's job. He married Rose Elisabeth Paget and ahd two kids: George Paget Thomson and Joan Paget Thomson. His son became a famous physicist and won a Nobel Prize. In 1906 he was awarded a Nobel Prize.

In his most famous experiment he took a vaccuum glass tube, put a positively charged metal plate on one end and a negatively charged plate on the other end. He was researching elements and thought doing this would give him information on the elements. When he did the experiment he found that a green ray went from the negatively charged plate to the positively charged plate.

To try to get rid of the ray he changed the metals, but that din't do anything. Then he though it was light, so he tested it with magnets (light isn't affected by magnets). The beam was affected by the magnets so he put more plates in the tube because he knew that magnetism and electricity are closely related. The beam always went toward the positively charged plate and away from the negatively charged plate, so he knew that the beam was negative because opposites attract.

He figured out that this beam was made of small particles that make up atoms. He called them Corpuscles (we call them electrons).

Niels Henrik David Bohr

Niels Henrik David Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1885. His father, Christian Bohr was a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen. His mother was Ellen Adler Bohr. Niels went to Trinity college and received a doctrite from Copenhagen University in 1911. Then he went to the University of Cambridge to do experiments with J.J. Thomson. After that he went to the University of Manchester to sstudy with Ernest Rutherford.

In 1916 he became a professor at the Univeristy of Copenhagen. In 1922 Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. A famous contribution to phyisics is the Bohr model. It is a model of an atom in which he sais that the electrons are moving.

Henry Moseley

Henry Moseley was born in Weymouth, England in 1887 to Henry and Amable Moseley. He attended Eton College. In 1906 he entered Trinity College, and then went on to Manchester University where he worked with Ernest Rutherford. After that he tried to go to Oxford but World War I started so he enlisted. He fought at Gallipoli, where he was killed in combat.

One of his greatest scientific achievements was rearranging the Periodic Table by atomic number to make more sense. In each column the elements were alike except for three pairs of elements. When the periodic table was rearranged by atomic number these pairs were switched around and the periodic table made more sense.

Answer 2

Many experiments. The biggest one was the gold foil experiment. Scientists shot electrons at a thin sheet of gold and noticed that most of the electrons passed through. This showed them that the atoms are mostly empty with solid neuclues and negatively charged particles surrounding them. (Another big thing used mathematical models to have an estimate to what the electron looks like. This has never been disproving so is right to the best of our knowledge)

Answer 3

They don't they assume, but veryaccurately because they measure an atoms characteristics through many experiments.

There are other theories besides atoms, like something called string theory. String theory works great for proving how the universe came into existence because it is the only theory that proves why gravity is not a level force or energy as the rest of the natural energies.

But then it is this imperfection that helps to allow us to exist.

Answer 4

Scientists never have, nor will they ever, actually know what an atom looks like. Scientists today still measure the properties of atoms via indirect methods, similarly to how they used to, the only thing that's changed is the precision of the measurements. When you look at a picture from an electron microscope, you're not seeing the atom. What you're actually seeing is a computer-generated, graphical representation of the atom's photon cross-section (probability that it will react with an electron per unit area.).

Think about it. In order to see anything our brain has to process the electromagnetic radiation coming from what we're looking at. The way an objects emits this radiation is through the lowering of energy states at the atomic level. There's no physically possible way that you could definably look at an object that is only emitting a few, very specific, quantas of energy. It would be analogous to knowing how a TV looked if all you could possibly see was one pixel of the screen.

Answer:

Until recently science has not ben able to see individual atoms (See Link) but this was not important. The high school representations of atoms a little solar systems (Bohr Model) and even the electron cloud probability density representations were not meant to show how they looked, just imdicate how they behaved. Itshould be noted that the probabilty density models seem to be in accord with actual observations.

Answer 5

The theory of the atom has been around sine the ancient greeks. They finally "found" the atom when they invented a microscope powerful enough to distinguish between individual atoms. How did they find the atom? They made a really really big microscope and pointed it at something.

Answer 6

By Discovering the Atom the Scientist discover the Atom by Discovering and they discover by discovering .. .. .. blah .. blah .. blah .. HARE

Answer 7

They split the atom and analysed what they saw, finding and naming things like protons and electrons.

Answer 8

Scientists use the microscope for the tiniest of projects

Answer 9

BY using a microscope