The Physics Of The Atom Essay - 1289 Words

The atom is the building block of every known physical element in existence. Every solid, liquid, gas, plasma has either neutralized or ionized particles. Atoms are tiny in size at around 10 billionths of a meter. The majority of the particles’ mass is the nucleus. The protons possess a positive charge, while electrons have a negative electric charge and neutrons have no electric charge. The atom is the fundamental unit of every element that has the chemical components of the element, consisting of a nucleus, a particular combination of neutrons and protons, and has one or more electrons bound to the core by an electrical charge. The thought that matter is made up of discrete units is a very ancient idea. This idea appears in several ancient cultures such Greece and India. Ancient Greek philosophers first coined the term atom. The Greek philosopher Democritus was the first person to use the word atom; meaning indivisible. He thought that if take any piece of matter and continuously subdivide it, a point would reach where the atom could not be divided anymore. This fundamental unit is what Democritus called an atom. However, these ideas were established based on philosophical and theological reasoning rather than through evidence and experimentation. Therefore, the views expressed by these philosophers on how atoms look like and behave were inconsistent. They were incapable of convincing everybody based on what they thought. Thus, atomism was just one of the many theoriesShow MoreRelatedEssay On Physics After The Discovery Of The Atom888 Words   |  4 PagesPARTICLE PHYSICS AFTER THE DISCOVERY OF THE HIGGS The world of physics had been developed a well-established model of the atom. The standard model had been pretty well â€Å"tied up†, with its group of 16 elementary particles and their nice set of rules describing how they should interact. 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He had more success with younger physicists like Australian William Lawrence Bragg, and New Zealand’s Ernest Rutherford, whose 1911 Rutherford method of the atom had challenged Thomson’s 1904 plum pudding