Abstract
Ernest Rutherford is remembered as the scientist who proposed a planetary atomic model that would overcome the atomic structure of the early 20th century, proposed by J.J. Thomson, and based on a volume of positive charge within which the negative charge was considered to be uniformly distributed. Reading Rutherford’s original paper published in 1911—allows us to compare the models of these two physicists and discuss the concept of the model itself.
Highlights
From the beginning of civilizations, curiosity has driven Man to investigate himself and Nature, and the principal means of tracing the why of things has very often been to “enter”, physically or through speculation and conjecture, into them
Thomson is based on the assumption that the scattering due to a single atomic encounter is small, and the particular structure assumed for the atom does not admit of a very large deflexion of an α particle in traversing a single atom (Rutherford, 1911).»
The character of the difference is more marked if we consider that among the quantities that refer to the first atom there is one, the radius of the positive sphere, which has the dimensions of a length and the same order of magnitude of the linear dimensions of the atom: this length does not appear among the quantities that characterise the second model; it is not possible to go back to the length of the radius of the Rutherford model only through the masses and charges of the electrons and of the positive nucleus
Summary
From the beginning of civilizations, curiosity has driven Man to investigate himself and Nature, and the principal means of tracing the why of things has very often been to “enter”, physically or through speculation and conjecture, into them.
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