Question

Describe at least three ways our understanding of the atom has changed. See the hint in the reference image.

Answer 1

The first model of the atom was developed by JJ Thomson in 1904, who thought that atoms were composed purely of negatively charged electrons.

This theory was then disproved by Ernest Rutherford and the gold foil experiment in 1911, where Rutherford shot alpha particles at gold foil, and noticed that some went through and some bounced back, implying the existence of a positive nucleus.

In 1926, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger created a quantum mechanical model of the atom by combining the equations for the behavior of waves with the de Broglie equation to generate a mathematical model for the distribution of electrons in an atom.