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He conducted his experiment in 1897. Thomson's most important line of work, interrupted only for lectures at Princeton University in 1896, was that which led him, in 1897, to the conclusion that all matter, whatever its source, contains particles of the same kind that are much less massive than the atoms of which they form a part. They are now called electrons, although he originally called them corpuscles. His discovery was the result of an attempt to solve a long-standing controversy regarding the nature of cathode rays, which occur when an electric current is driven through a vessel from which most of the air or other gas has been pumped out. Nearly all German physicists of the time held that these visible rays were produced by occurrence in the ether-a weightless substance then thought to pervade all space-but that they were neither ordinary light nor the recently discovered X rays.

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15y ago

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