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Chemistry library
Course: Chemistry library > Unit 7
Lesson 1: History of atomic structureThe history of atomic chemistry
How did we get here? Well, in terms of Atomic Chemistry, Hank takes us on a tour of the folks that were part of the long chain of other folks who helped us get to these deeper understandings of the world. From Leucippus to Heisenberg to you - yes, YOU - the story of Atomic Chemistry is all wibbly-wobbly... and amazing.
Writers: Edi Gonzalez
Chief Editor: Blake de Pastino
Consultant: Dr. Heiko Langner
Director/Editor: Nicholas Jenkins
Sound Designer: Michael Aranda
Graphics: Thought Cafe
Want to join the conversation?
- why did Rutherford used only gold foil in his experiment? why he did not used any other element?(57 votes)
- the answer to this question is quite simple. I think there were basically two reasons behind this:-
firstly,its not much reactive.
and secondly, Gold is extremely malleable.
The thin foil which was used by Rutherford was about only a 1000 atoms thick and gold is one of the best metals which can be bitten into such condition.(35 votes)
- as stated in video at, how was J.J. Thomson able to calculate mass of the rays as told it was 1000 times lighter than hydrogen. 3:24(7 votes)
- The statement in the video is wrong.
In 1897, J. J. Thomson used an electric field (V) to accelerate electrons into a magnetic field (B).
The magnetic field deflected the electrons into circular paths of known radius (r).
He could then calculate the charge-to-mass ratio (e/m) of the electron.
e/m = 2V/(B²r²)
In 1906, Robert Millikan's famous oil drop experiment gave the charge on an electron.
Only then did it become possible to calculate the mass of an electron.(39 votes)
- I stumbled upon this link a while ago. Why isn't this incorporated into the western modern day chemistry we study?
http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-technology/indian-sage-who-developed-atomic-theory-2600-years-ago-001399(14 votes)- it isn't included into the present day chemistry of western culture because many of the western scientists did not believe that india was more advanced in the feild of science in ancient times than them also the early indian knowledge of sages was passed down verbally and therefore there was no written evidence for a long time
may be even before that time these things were known to indians but due to the absence of proper written evidence the western culture tends to credit ancient greek philosophers for most of the basic knowledge in the feild of science and maths.(14 votes)
- Why did Rutherford use a screen coated with zinc sulphide?(11 votes)
- Zinc sulphide gives a bright spot wherever a particle of appropriate size strikes it. This allows in counting. Read up on scintillations.(15 votes)
- in the video, at, it is said that rutherford expected the rays to pass through straight. According to thomson's model, the electrons are embedded in a positive matrix. should he not expect all the rays to rebound? 4:40(9 votes)
- Even with the plum pudding model, an atom would be largely empty space so you would expect alpha particles to pass through unimpeded. Furthermore, with this model, even if an alpha particle did, by chance, encounter a proton it would be an isolated proton and no match for the heavier alpha particle. What Rutherford found is that the protons (neutrons had not yet been discovered) were all concentrated in one place giving a very dense nucleus able to repel or deflect the alpha particles.(6 votes)
- Athow does the bombardment of nitrogen on alpha particles create hydrogen ions? 5:12(3 votes)
- Nitrogen-14, when bombarded with high energy alpha particles, will form Oxygen-17 and release a proton. This is nuclear fusion.(11 votes)
- 3:26
Isn't electron 2000 times lighter than hydrogen? Why did he say that cathode ray is about 1000 times ligher than hydrogen? Did I miss something?(1 vote)- Back then, in the late 19th and early 20th century, there were not so much sophisticated equipments to measure the quantities of so tiny a paticles. Also, JJ Thomson measured the values of e/m, but neither e nor m were determined. Milikan's oil drop experiment determined the value of e, and hence m was detemined. so, there is a bit of untrue info at3:26(4 votes)
- Do electrons orbit like planets (teacher test question)(1 vote)
- The structure and the movement of electrons might be a bit similar to that of Planets in Solar system, but the motion, energy and characteristics of electrons are quite different from planets. But of course, the way sun pulls the planets towards itself could be compared to nucleus pulling electrons towards itself. In both cases, Centrifugal and Centripetal forces are acting.(3 votes)
- If the plum pudding model states that the electrons are embedded in a cloud of positive charge, why did Rutherford expect the alpha rays to pass right through? Shouldn't he think that they will repel and the rays will reflect back?(1 vote)
- Not at all. The volume of the gold atom is about 10¹³ times the volume of its nucleus, so the density of the positive charge is extremely small.
It really was like shooting the α particles through a thin cloud.(4 votes)
- Thanks for the amazing video Khan Academy. Well, I've learnt that during the experiment the electricity should be passed in high voltage and in low pressure which in result show a good conductivity in the gases. Why ?(2 votes)
- During high pressure, in gases the density increases. Hence the electron density increases and therefore the conductivity is higher.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- How do you picture an atom in your mind? Like this, or like this,
or maybe one of these. If you understand enough
about atoms to visualize any of those things then you
know more about atomic theory then the scientists did
just a hundred years ago. And like way more than they thought they knew 2,500 years ago. That's when Greek philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus first came up with the idea that matter is
composed of tiny particles. No one knows how they
developed this concept but they didn't think the particles were particularly
special they just thought that if you cut something
in half enough times, eventually you'll reach a particle that can't be cut anymore. They gave these particles
the name a tomos, which means uncuttable or indivisible. So, basically they
thought that iron was made up of iron particles and clay was made up of clay particles and cheese was made up of cheese particles. And they attributed
properties of each substance the forms of the atom. So they thought that iron atoms were hard and stuck together with hooks. Clay atoms were softer and attached by ball socket joints that
made them flexible. And cheese atoms were
squishy and delicious. Then this makes a certain amount of sense if you don't happen to have
access to electron microscopes or cathode ray tubes or the work of generations
of previous scientists. Cause the fact is atomic
theory as we know it today is the product of
hundreds if not thousands of different insights. Some models like that of Leucippus were just blind guesses. As time went on many more were the result of rigorous experimentation. But, as has been the case in all science, each scientist built on what
had been learned before. We've been talking a lot about the fine details of
chemistry in recent weeks and we're gonna keep doing that as we move on to nuclear chemistry, and then to the basics
of organic chemistry. But before we do I wanted to set aside some time to explain how we know what we know about the atom today, and how we know that we're not quite done figuring it out. (upbeat music) Now you might think that
once Leucippus and Democritus came up with the general idea of atoms it'd be pretty easy for someone else to take that little indivisible ball and run with it. But, you'd be wrong. The next major developments
in atomic theory didn't come along for nearly 2,300 years. I've already told you, for instance about the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier who proposed the Law
of Conservation of Mass which states that even if
matter changes in shape or form, its mass stays the same. And you should remember
the English teacher James Dalton who determined that elements exist as discrete
packets of matter. Thanks to these and other great minds by the 1800's we had a better grip on the general behavior of atoms. The next logical question was, "Why? Why do they behave the way they do?" This led to the investigation
of atomic structure. In the 1870's scientists
began probing what stuff was made of using discharge tubes. Basically gas filled tubes with electrodes at each end, which emit light when an electric current passes through them. Basically what a neon light is. Because this light was originally produced by a negative electrode or a cathode it was called a cathode ray and it had a negative charge. But in 1886 German
physicist Eugen Goldstein found that the tubes also emitted light from the positive electrode, basically a ray heading
in the opposite direction, which meant that there must also must be a positive charge in matter. Goldstein didn't fully understand what he'd discovered here. I mean scientists still hadn't figured out what was responsible
for the negative charge in the rays either. Then English physicist
J.J.Thompson took the discharge tube research further. By measuring how much heat
the cathode rays generated, how much they could be bent
by magnets and other things, he was able to estimate
the mass of the rays. And the mass was about a 1000
times lighter than hydrogen, the smallest bit of
matter known at the time. He concluded that the cathode rays weren't rays or waves at all, but were in fact very light, very small negatively charged particles. He called them corpuscles. We call them electrons. So even though we didn't understand what shapes they took, we knew that they were both negative and positive components to matter. The next question was, "How were they arranged in the atom." Thompson knew that the atom overall had a neutral charge so he immagined that the negatively charged electrons must be distributed randomly in a positively charged matrix. And the very English Thompson visualized this model as a familiar English dessert. Plum Pudding. The positive matrix being the cake, and the electrons the random floating bits of fruit within it. Even today Thompson's model of the atom continues to be called
the Plum Pudding Model. And while a single
electron's motion is random the overall distribution of them is not. The next big step was
taken by New Zealander Earnest Rutherford in 1909. He designed an experiment using an extremely thin sheet of gold foil and the screen coated with zinc sulfide. He bombarded the foil with alpha particles which he didn't really
know what they were, just that they were produced
by the decay of radium they were positively charged and they were really, really small. He expected them to just fly right through the foil with no deflection and many of them did just that. But as it turned out,
some of the particles were deflected at large angles and sometimes almost straight backward. The only explanation for this was that the entire positive charge in an atom, the charge that would
repel an alpha particle, must be concentrated in a very small area. An area that he called the nucleus. Because most of the alpha particles passed right through the atoms undeterred Rutherford concluded that most of the atom is empty space. And he was correct. Rutherford would later discover that if he bombarded nitrogen
with alpha particles it created a bunch of hydrogen ions. Now he correctly surmised that these tiny positively charged ions were themselves fundamental
particles, protons. Now we're getting close to reality. So these chemists had a fairly good idea of the structure of the atom, they just needed to figure out what exactly the electrons were doing. Enter Neils Bohr. In 1911, the same year the results of Rutherfords gold-foil
experiment were published, Bohr traveled to England
to study with Rutherford. And as a physicist, he was also interested in the mathematical models set forth by German physicists Max
Planck and Albert Einstein to explain the behavior
of electromagnetic energy. Over time, Bohr came to realize that these mathematical
principles could be applied to Rutherford's atomic model. His analysis of the gold-foil experiment calculations based on the proportion of alpha particles that went straight through those that were slightly deflected and those that bounced
almost completely backward allowed him to predict
the most likely positions of electrons within the atom. Bohr's resulting model, sometimes called the Planetary Model is still familiar to most people probably including you. It represents the electrons in orbits around a small central nucleus. Each orbit can have a
specific number of electrons which correlates to the energy levels and orbitals in the
modern model of an atom. And why it's definitely flawed, Bohrs model is very close to reality in some important ways. But like everyone I've mentioned in the past couple of minutes, Bohr was at once fantastically right and way off. The problem was those pesky electrons. It was the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg who got
everyone to understand just how huge and mindblowing this electron problem was. But he was also the one
who tied the whole mess up into a neat little bundle. Using his wicked math chops,
Heisenberg discovered that it is impossible to know with certainty both the momentum of an electron, or any subatomic particle,
and its exact position. And the more you know about one of those two variables, the harder it gets to measure the other one. So if you can't measure the position or momentum of an electron you obviously can't say with certainty that the electrons in an atom are all neatly aligned in circular orbits so he and a new wave of physicists and chemists proposed a new theory, a Quantum Theory, which proposes that electrons weren't particles or waves instead they had properties
of both and neither. By this thinking the arrangement of electrons around a nucleus could only be described in terms of probability. In other words, there are certain regions where an electron is much more likely to be found. We call these regions orbitals. You know the very same orbitals that you and I have been talking about. The ones that go by the names s and p and d and f and that form sigma and pi bonds. Those are the things that
Heisenbergs theory predict. And that's the modern
understanding of atoms. Because it's based on probability, quantum style atoms are
often drawn as clouds with the intensity of color representing not individual electrons but the probability of finding an electron in any particular position. For this reason the Quantum Model is often called the Cloud Model of the atom. And now you know. All the people I've mentioned and many others put their heads together over time to build this current and I might say quite elegant understanding of atomic theory. Now after 2500 years even
though we can't see them we can know what they're
like and how they work because a long succession of scientists contributed bits and pieces to the whole fantastic picture. But it's also important to recognize that we still may not be quite all the way right. Thompson's contemporaries were sure that the Plum Pudding Model was right. Scientists in Bohr's day fully believed that the Planetary Model was right. And today we're extremely confident that the Qantum Model is correct. But it may not be all the way correct and that's where you come in. The only way we can go on being sure is to keep asking questions and conducting experiments.