The importance of these laws for us is that they provided 19th and 20th century scientists with the challenge of how to explain them. (The modern version qualifies this a bit.) The second scientific law that concerns us is the Law of Definite Proportions (or Constant Composition) that states that a specific compound always contains the same elements in the same definite proportions by mass. The first scientific law that affected the development of atomic theory is the Law of Conservation of Mass (or Matter) that states that matter and thus mass are neither created nor destroyed in the process of normal chemical reactions. One way to distinguish between scientific laws and scientific theories is that scientific laws describe what happens, and scientific theories explain why things happen. Scientific Laws are general statements about nature that are based on repeated experiments or observations. Our story starts with two of the scientific laws suggested in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The purpose of this webpage is supplement what I did in the text by describing this history. For the ultimate honor he was buried in Westminster Abbey.įeatured image: Ernest Rutherford in academic regalia.When I was writing my text, I decided that I wanted to devote more time and space to describing the modern model of the atom instead of including the traditional description of the historical development of atomic theory. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1908 he was made a knight and then a peer with a seat in the House of Lords. Like Thomson, Rutherford garnered many honors. Thomson in the Cavendish Professorship at Cambridge and again gathered a vigorous research group, including James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron. Moseley (who obtained experimental evidence for atomic numbers).ĭuring World War I this Manchester research group was largely dispersed, and Rutherford turned to solving problems connected with submarine detection. At McGill University in Montreal, his first appointment, he worked with Frederick Soddy on radioactive decay.Īt Manchester University he collaborated with Hans Geiger (of Geiger counter fame), Niels Bohr (whose model of atomic structure succeeded Rutherford’s), and H. Throughout his career Rutherford displayed his ability to work creatively with associates, some of whom were already established at the institutions to which he was appointed and others of whom he attracted as doctoral or postgraduate students. Letter from Ernest Rutherford to Georg Bredig, 1912. There he began experimenting with the transmission of radio waves, went on to join Thomson’s ongoing investigation of the conduction of electricity through gases, and then turned to the field of radioactivity just opened up by Henri Becquerel and Pierre and Marie Curie. Thomson’s first graduate student at the Cavendish Laboratory. He was released from this task by a scholarship to Cambridge University, where he became J. Education and Early Careerīorn on a farm in New Zealand, the fourth of 12 children, Rutherford completed a degree at the University of New Zealand and began teaching unruly schoolboys. Rutherford on the New Zealand 100-dollar banknote. Most important, he postulated the nuclear structure of the atom: experiments done in Rutherford’s laboratory showed that when alpha particles are fired into gas atoms, a few are violently deflected, which implies a dense, positively charged central region containing most of the atomic mass. He discovered alpha and beta rays, set forth the laws of radioactive decay, and identified alpha particles as helium nuclei. A Series of DiscoveriesĪ consummate experimentalist, Rutherford was responsible for a remarkable series of discoveries in the fields of radioactivity and nuclear physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) postulated the nuclear structure of the atom, discovered alpha and beta rays, and proposed the laws of radioactive decay.
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