Who discovered the atom?
Love is the battery of life....
Hi,
It was Dalton, actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_theory
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Ignorance can be cured, but stupidity lasts forever.
The atom was hypothesized by many people long before there was technology that could prove its existence. Ernest B Rutherford is credited with performing the experiment that gave the first hard evidence of the atom's existence.
Atomic theory antedated the Greek Philosophers. The earliest work we know of came from Assyrian alchemists who dabbled in the properties of gold, silver, mercury, and sulfur. Chinese alchemists first classified chemicals according to their reactive properties, but they didn't go far enough.
Ancient Sumerians deduced that some substances could not be broken down to portions smaller than they could see, but Dalton's work gave us a clue as to the actual structure of the atom.
It fell to Leo Szilard to deduce the existence of the Neutron, but it took much longer for my little team to discover that other particles exiated than Protons, Neutrons, and Electrons. We deduced the pion, and deduced the function of the photon in transmitting electrical charges from the lepton to the nucleon, and back again, which defines C. Hence we defined the relationship between high-Q gamma, electrons, and positrons, which in time gave rise to PET technology.
The thing is, we still know nothing.
When we fully understand the difference between nothing and something, then we will have begun to crack the riddle of matter.
Democritus and Leucippus I think
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