The idea of atoms is not a new one! The Greeks philosopher Democritus suggested over 2500 years ago
that matter was made up of solid tiny balls called atoms. Democritus thought of atoms as unbreakable
spheres. These ideas about atoms changed little for thousands of years and it is really only in the last
120 years or so that any real insight was made into the nature and structure of atoms. One of the first
pioneers on this journey was John Dalton.
Dalton was born in 1766 in the Lake District, England.
He was interested in the sciences, in particular chemistry, physics and meteorology. Dalton is best
known for his atomic theory and his gas laws, which you will probably meet in your physics course.
According to Dalton's atomic theory:
Sir John Joseph Thomson was professor of physics at Cambridge University in 1884. Thomson is
credited with the discovery of the electron. The idea that
atoms were not made of indestructible
solid balls had been around for around 30 years or so and the idea of electrons had been around
since 1874 when G.J Stoney suggested the name to explain some observations in his work. But Thompson
is credited with providing proof of its existence.
Now gases do not normally conduct electricity, however Thompson was investigating how their
conductivity changed at very low pressures when very high voltages were applied across them.
He set up an experiment similar to the one shown below. It basically consists of a glass tube
filled with gas at very low pressure, with a fluorescent screen at one end. Half way up the tube
were 2 charged plates, one positively charged and one negatively charged. At the other end was a
piece of metal which was connected to the negative terminal of a power supply, this was the cathode.
A metal disc with a slit in it was connected to the positive terminal of the power supply.
A diagram of his apparatus is shown below.
What Thompson observed while running the experiment was a green glow from the fluorescent screen
where a "beam" or "ray" (shown as blue dots in the diagram) coming from the cathode had struck it.
He noticed that the "ray" was deflected or bent away from the negatively charged plate.
This told him that the "ray" had a negative charge. Since these rays were coming from the
cathode he called them cathode rays!. Calculations showed that these cathode rays were over
1840 lighter than a hydrogen atom and that no matter which gas was placed in the tube or if a different metal was
used as the cathode they
were always produced.
Thompson realised that these "corpuscles", as he called them had a
negative charge and they were present in all atoms. So atoms were not solid indestructible
balls after all. The name corpuscles was later changed to the electron.
Thompson developed a new model of
the atom to explain his observations. Thompson's model of the atom is often called the
plum pudding model. His idea of what an atom looks like is a sphere of positive charge
in which are embedded the electrons. A bit like a plum pudding or chocolate chip cookie.
Thompson's calculations had shown that the electron was 1/1840th the mass of a hydrogen
atom. The hydrogen atom must therefore contain 1840 electrons.
According to Thompson's plum pudding model of the atom the positive charge of the pudding was spread out over the whole atom and it would not have been able to stop a heavy bullet like projectile such as a heavy positively charged alpha particle. So Rutherford would have expected all the alpha particles to pass straight through the gold foil. Indeed most of the alpha particles did but some were deflected and some bounced straight back. This was not what Rutherford was expecting at all. This should have been impossible based on the plum pudding model!
Since most
of the alpha particles passed straight through and only a few were deflected through large angles,
it was concluded that the atom consisted of mostly empty space but with a tiny area positive of charge located at the centre - the nucleus!
The alpha particles that were deflected were those that had come close to the nucleus , since the
alpha particles
have a positive charge the closer they got to the positively charged nucleus the greater the angle through
which they would have been deflected (this is shown in the image opposite).
The fact that very few alpha particles, about 1 in 10 0000 were deflected straight back means that the chance of any hitting the nucleus must have been small, so the nucleus must be tiny.
Rutherford was also able to calculate the size of the nucleus from his experimental work, he calculated
that the nucleus was about 1/10 000th the size of the atom.
The results from Rutherford's gold foil experiment proved beyond any doubt that Thompson's Plum Pudding model was wrong. However it still left some questions unanswered. The main problem were the electrons. In Rutherford's model the electrons were simply spinning around the nucleus. Since they had a negative charge and the protons inside the nucleus had a positive charge, what was there to stop the electrons crashing into the nucleus? The answer to this problem was provided by Neils Bohr and led to the idea of electron shells or energy levels in atoms.