The Atom :: essays research papers fc

The Atom     In the spring of 1897 J.J. Thomson demonstrated that the beam of impetuousmatter in a cathode-ray tube was not made of smartness waves, as "the almostunanimous opinion of German physicists" held. Rather, cathode rays werenegatively aerated particles boiling off the negative cathode and attracted tothe positive anode. These particles could be deflected by an galvanizing field andbent into curved paths by a magnetic field. They were untold lighter thanhydrogen constituents and were identical "what ever the gas through which the tirepasses" if gas was introduced into the tube. Since they were lighter than thelightest known kind of matter and identical no matter of the kind of matterthey were born from, it followed that they must be some staple fibre constituent partof matter, and if they were a part, then there must be a whole. The real,physical electron implied a real, physical instalment the particulate theory ofmatter was th erefore entirelyified for the first time convincingly by physicalexperiment. They sang success at the annual Cavendish dinner.      gird with the electron, and knowing from other experiment that what wasleft when electrons were stripped away from an atom was much more massiveremainder that was positively charged, Thomson went on in the next decade todevelop a model 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" like raisins in a pudding, was ahybrid particulate electrons and diffuse remainder. It served the usefulpurpose of demonstrating mathematically that electrons could be arranged in astable 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 niceclear th at the electrons were responsible for chemical affinities betweenelements, that chemistry was ultimately electrical.     Thomson just missed discovering X rays in 1884. He was not so hexedin legend as the Oxford physicist Frederick Smith, who found that photographicplates kept dear a cathode-ray tube were liable to be fogged and merely told his retainer to move them to another place. Thomson noticed that glass tubing held"at a distance of some feet from the discharge-tube" fluoresced just as the wallof the tube itself did when bombarded with cathode rays, merely he was too intenton studying the rays themselves to purse the cause. Rontgen disjunct the effectby covering his cathode-ray tube with black paper. When a close screen offlorescent material still glowed he realized that whatever was cause the