The Atom :: essays research papers fc

The Atom     In the spring of 1897 J.J. Thomson exhibit that the beam of glowing progeny in a cathode-ray tube was non made of light waves, as "the almostunanimous opinion of German physicists" held. Rather, cathode rays werenegatively charged particles boiling off the negative cathode and attracted tothe positive anode. These particles could be deflected by an electric field andbent into curved paths by a magnetic field. They were much lighter thanhydrogen atoms and were identical "what ever the particle accelerator through which the dischargepasses" if gas was introduced into the tube. Since they were lighter than thelightest known kind of matter and identical regardless of the kind of matterthey were born from, it followed that they must be some basic constituent partof matter, and if they were a part, then in that location must be a whole. The real, personal electron implied a real, physical atom the particulate theory ofmatter was therefo re justified for the initial time convincingly by physicalexperiment. They sang success at the annual Cavendish dinner.     Armed with the electron, and knowing from other experiment that what wasleft when electrons were au naturel(p) away from an atom was much more massiveremainder that was positively charged, Thomson went on in the next decade todevelop a instance of the atom that came to be called the "plum pudding" model.The Thomson atom, "a number of negatively electrified corpuscles enclosed in asphere of uniform positive electrification" want raisins in a pudding, was ahybrid particulate electrons and diffuse remainder. It served the expedientpurpose of demonstrating mathematically that electrons could be arranged in a constant configurations within an atom and that the mathematically stablearrangements could account for the similarities and regularities among chemicalelements that the periodic table of the elements displays. It was b ecomingclear that the electrons were responsible for chemical affinities betweenelements, that chemical science was ultimately electrical.     Thomson just missed discovering X rays in 1884. He was not so unluckyin legend as the Oxford physicist Frederick Smith, who found that photographicplates kept near a cathode-ray tube were liable to be fuzzy and merely told hisassistant to move them to another place. Thomson noticed that glass electron tube held"at a distance of some feet from the discharge-tube" fluoresced just as the contendof the tube itself did when bombarded with cathode rays, but he was too intenton examine the rays themselves to purse the cause. Rontgen isolated the effectby covering his cathode-ray tube with shadowy paper. When a nearby screen offlorescent material still glowed he completed that whatever was causing the