![]() If, like Newton, we try to visualise an atom as a hard, spherical body, or, like Boscovitch and Faraday, consider it as a centre of force, or accept Lord Kelvin’s vorticial atomic theory, an isolated atom is an unknown entity difficult to conceive of.Ĭrookes’ statement is insightful, for indeed the atom is too small to see, but everything is made up of millions and millions of these tiny bricks. What is the atom, and is it the same atom that appears in solid, liquid or gaseous states? Each of these states involves ideas that have to do only with vast groupings of atoms. The most representative example of what was known about the subject is well described in a speech given by the eminent English chemist and physicist William Crookes at the Congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1898: While most scientists had no doubt that matter was made up of atoms, none of them had any idea what those atoms looked like. CrookesĪt the end of the 19th century, it was not clear how matter was constituted. In this post we are going to tell the story of the discovery of atomic structure and, of course, the role that mathematics played in that discovery. We have devoted several of our previous posts (see here and here, for example) to explain how the attempt to understand certain natural phenomena led physicists and mathematicians in the early 20th century to propose some unorthodox theories.
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