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General

A long time ago, in 400 BC, there was a Greek thinker named Democritus. He was the very first person to come up with the idea of tiny building blocks called atoms! He even gave them a special name, "atomos," which means "unable to be broken down." Isn’t that cool? Democritus believed that if you kept splitting something into smaller and smaller pieces, you would eventually reach a point where you couldn’t cut it anymore. Unfortunately, nobody really listened to him for many, many years because he didn’t have any proof to show his ideas were right. Evidence is super important when sharing new ideas!

Music

The next big idea about atoms came from an English teacher named John Dalton in the 1800s. He created something called the solid sphere model, which he also called the "Pool Ball model." Dalton imagined atoms as tiny, solid balls, just like pool balls! He built on the earlier ideas of Democritus and brought them into the modern world. Dalton thought that atoms were super strong—like they couldn’t be broken or changed. He also believed they were dense, solid, and didn’t have any empty space inside. Isn’t that interesting?

Movies

After Dalton, there was a super cool scientist named J.J. Thomson, who changed how we think about atoms! You might be asking, “Who is J.J. Thomson?” Well, let me tell you! He was an English physicist who discovered something really important called the electron using a special tool called a cathode ray tube. While he was exploring, he noticed that the electrons were moving in a negative direction. That’s pretty neat! He also found out that atoms are super, super tiny—so tiny that we can't even see them! Thomson’s model of the atom looked like a big circle with little negative charges floating in a positive goo, kind of like a delicious chocolate cookie with yummy chocolate chips! Doesn’t that sound tasty?

Television

After the amazing J.J. Thomson, there was an even cooler scientist named Ernest Rutherford from New Zealand! In 1910, he wanted to learn more about atoms, so he set up something super interesting called the Gold Foil Experiment. Did you know that Rutherford and Thomson worked together in the same lab? At first, Rutherford wasn’t so sure about Thomson’s idea of how atoms worked, so he decided to try his own experiment! In his experiment, he took tiny, positively charged particles called alpha particles and aimed them at a very thin piece of gold foil. He wanted to see what would happen! Most of the particles went straight through the foil, but a few bounced back. That surprised him! From this, Rutherford figured out that there must be a tiny, positive center in each atom, which he called the Great Nucleus. Because of this amazing discovery, he won a Nobel Prize! How cool is that?

Books

I know you might be getting a little bored, but we’re almost done! There are just two more scientists to learn about. Next up is Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist who lived in the 1910s. He liked Rutherford’s idea about atoms, but he thought it needed a few fixes. So, he used his smarts about energy to answer a big question: “Why don’t electrons crash into the nucleus?” Bohr made his own model called “The Bohr Model.” He believed that electrons move around the nucleus in orbits, kind of like planets going around the sun. He discovered that the electrons fill the closest orbits first, starting with the lowest energy levels. If that level is full, they’ll move to the next one! He also found out that when an electron jumps from one orbit to another, it gives off energy. He talked about two important states: the “Ground State,” where all the electrons are in the lowest energy levels, and the “Excited State,” where one electron gets a boost and moves up to a higher energy level. Isn’t that cool? Just one more scientist to go!

Heroes

Let’s talk about our last scientist, Mr. Schrödinger! He lived in the 1920s and was a really smart physicist from Austria. Schrödinger discovered something cool: you can know how much energy an electron has or where it is, but not both at the same time! He also found out that electrons can act like both little balls and waves. He created a special model called the Quantum Mechanical model. This model helped him understand that electrons don’t travel in perfect circles like planets do; instead, they hang out in a “cloud” where we can guess where they might be. This guessing depends on how much energy they have, which is something another scientist named Bohr talked about. Thanks for listening to us! We hope you learned something fun today! 😊