Atomic physics

Atomic physics, the scientific study of the structure of the atom, its energy states, and its interactions with other particles and with electric and magnetic fields

The idea that matter is made up of basic building blocks dates back to the ancient Greeks, who hypothesized that earth, air, fire, and water could form the basic elements that make up the material world. He also developed different schools of thought about the ultimate nature of matter. Perhaps the most notable was the atomist school founded by the ancient Greeks Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Thrace around 440 BC. For purely philosophical reasons, and without empirical evidence, they developed the concept that matter is composed of indivisible and indivisible atoms. Atoms are in constant motion in the surrounding space and collide with each other like billiard balls, just like the modern kinetic theory of gases. However, the need for space (or spaces) between atoms led to new questions that could not be easily answered. For this reason, the atomist picture was rejected by Aristotle and the Athenian school in favor of the notion that matter is continuous. Nevertheless, the idea persisted, and it reappeared 400 years later in the writings of the Roman poet Lucretius, in his work De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things).

Little else was done to advance the idea that matter could be made up of smaller particles until the 17th century. The English physicist Isaac Newton proposed in his Principia Mathematica (1687) that Boyle’s law, which states that the pressure product and the volume of a gas are constant at the same temperature, could be explained by If one considers that gas is composed of particles. In 1808, the English chemist John Dalton proposed that each element consisted of identical atoms, and in 1811 the Italian physicist Amedeo Avogadro hypothesized that particles of elements could consist of two or more atoms bonded together. I am connected. Avogadro called such aggregates molecules, and based on experimental work, he deduced that molecules in hydrogen or oxygen gas were made up of pairs of atoms.