Abstract
Following Rutherford’s pathbreaking discovery that the atom had a nuclear center, physicists found themselves with a host of new problems to solve. As we have mentioned, a large number of physicists set to work on the problem of how atoms work.
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Notes
- 1.
In Plato’s dialog I ω ν, Socrates tells Ion: “… it is a divine influence which moves you, like that which resides in the stone called Magnet by Euripides, and Heraclea by the people. For not only does this stone possess the power of attracting iron rings but it can communicate to them the power of attracting other rings; so that you may see sometimes a long chain of rings and other iron substances attached and suspended one to the other by this influence.”
- 2.
Maxwell’s four part paper “On physical lines of force” was published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1861 and 1862. His subsequent “A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field,” published in 1864 established that light was an electromagnetic wave.
- 3.
Volta communicated his results in a letter to the Royal Society of London on March 20, 1800. Le Prix du Galvanisme was awarded annually in the years 1802–1815.
- 4.
Thomson published his quantitative results in the Philosophical Magazine in 1897. Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 “in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases.”
- 5.
Thomson’s experiments were detailed in his report “Rays of positive electricity,” made on May 22, 1913 to the Royal Society of London.
- 6.
Aston was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes, in a large number of non-radioactive elements, and for his enunciation of the whole-number rule.”
- 7.
The atomic mass unit utilized Aston’s definition: M(16O) = 16. In the SI system of units, the Dalton (Da) is defined as 1/12 of the mass of12C in its ground state.
- 8.
Equation 8.16 is equally valid if we consider the vectors p i to be the four-dimensional momentum vectors.
- 9.
This analysis was applied by the American physicist Arthur Holly Compton to describe the scattering of electrons by γ rays. Chadwick argued that the same basic equations should also apply to other charged masses like protons. Compton was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his discovery of the effect named after him.” Compton shared the prize with the Scottish physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, who earned the award “for his method of making the paths of electrically charged particles visible by condensation of vapour.”
- 10.
Chadwick was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935 “for the discovery of the neutron.”
- 11.
Glaser was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1960 “for his invention of the bubble chamber.”
- 12.
This reproduction is actually a negative image that has better contrast when printed. The original images have bright trails of reflected light from the bubbles against a black background.
- 13.
Note that we use here the common word particle to describe the various states of matter. As we have indicated previously, these particles are inherently waves, so one should not attempt to produce a mental image of these fundamental states of matter as small spheres or beads, despite the very tempting inclination to interpret the bubble trails as having substance.
- 14.
Originally, the classifications utilized the Greek roots \(\lambda \epsilon \pi \tau \acute{o}\zeta\) (thin or slender), \(\mu \acute{\epsilon }\sigma o\zeta\) (middle), \(\beta \alpha \rho \acute{\upsilon }\zeta\) (heavy) and \(\grave{\alpha }\delta \rho \acute{o}\zeta\) (thick) to indicate the masses of the particles. As physicists continued their experiments, mesons were discovered that were heavier than the proton, so the term meson no longer refers to the mass of the particle.
- 15.
The cloud chamber was the forerunner of the bubble chamber. It was filled with gas not fluid and produced far fewer events than the bubble chambers.
- 16.
There is a recurrent theme here.
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© 2015 Mark A. Cunningham
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Cunningham, M.A. (2015). VIII Constituents of the Atom. In: Neoclassical Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10647-2_8
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