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Period: 3500 BCE to
What is Alchemy
Alchemy means the art of transmuting metals and could be considered an early sign of chemistry because of how they tried to transform metal into gold. There are 3 main origins, Chinese, Western, and Indian alchemy. They all came from the cultures in their area. Hermes and his caduceus was among alchemy's principal symbols. With its central figure, Hermes Trismegistus (or Thrice-Great Hermes). Many western alchemy writings were lost when Emperor Diocletian ordered the burning of alchemical books. -
600 BCE
Work of Parmenides
He is a Presocratic Greek philosopher that became the father of the metaphysical because of his inquiry into the nature of existence itself. He is also the founder of the Ealiatic school. He is also put into consideration for the father of logic with Aristotle because he was the first to employ deductive, a priori arguments to justify his claims, -
Period: 600 BCE to 500 BCE
Life of Parmenides
He is a Presocratic Greek philosopher famed for being the first philosopher who studied the nature of existence and is the founder of the Eleatic school that argued reality is in some sense a unified and unchanging singular entity. This makes him the father of the Metaphysics. Since he was the first to use deductive reasoning to prove his arguments, he competes with Aristotle to be the father of reason. He challenged metaphysical successors making him a major pivotal point in philosophy. -
492 BCE
Four Element Theory From Empedocles
States that all living things fall under 1 of 4 categories. Fire, air, water, or earth. It was derived from the earliest form of particle physics (three-element theory). When man was trying to understand and explain the natural phenomenons that were happening around them. These elements were categorized from highest to lowest, fire being the first followed by air, then water, then ending on earth. -
Period: 492 BCE to 432 BCE
Life of Empedocles
He was a very famous and influential philosopher and a poet but was also a pro-democrat politician. He was called everything from a living god to fraud. He expanded the 4-element theory of matter. He was also a follower of Pythagoras, hence a believer in the transmigration of souls and a vegetarian. He was born into a wealthy aristocratic family in Acragas, Sicily who was very familiar with Parmenides's physical system and wanted to rectify it. Although there are no records of who mentored him. -
Period: 460 BCE to 370 BCE
Life of Democritus
He was an Ancient Greek philosopher who is remembered for creating the first atom that started the atomic theory with his mentor, Leucippus. Sadly most of what is known about him came from Aristotle, his rival in philosophy because his work was lost with only fragments remaining in the form of treatises on ethics. He is thought to have been a wealthy man in the Abdera, Thrace during the advanced age who was well travelled in the east. -
400 BCE
Work of Democritus
Democritus asserted that the void must have invisible things that exist within the infinite space. He said that these 'atoms' were indivisible and eternal, hence the Greek name atomon, or indivisible in English. -
400 BCE
About Democritus Atom
He thought that the 'atom' was solid and filled the entire space it occupies. They were homogenous because they only differed in shape, arrangement, position, and magnitude differed. All atoms are isomers and compounds made from them can increase/decrease in the number of these atoms, appearing to disappear/appear. Water and iron are an example of this, the same 'atom' but in different arrangements causing the different properties. -
Work of Dalton
He changed meteorology from folklore to a serious science. Then he said that every constituent in a mixture of gasses in our atmosphere has the same pressure if it were by itself which went against what everyone thought, there were 80% N and 20% O in our atmosphere. He was hailed by John Frederic Daniell as the "father of meteorology" for this. Later he was elected to be a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and published the first book on colour blindness, AKA Daltism. -
Daltons Atom
His most influential work in chemistry was his atomic theory, but he did not remember in detail how he came to develop this theory. He said that only atoms in a mixture of gases repel each other while they react indifferently to each other. This lets us figure out why each gas in a mixture acts independently. Although this was erroneous, it abolished Democritus' way, that all atoms were identical. He wanted to find out the relative mass of each atom, which went against the simplicity of nature -
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Life of Dalton
He was born into a Quaker family of tradesmen and was the youngest among his siblings to make it into adulthood. He was called to be an assistant to the head of the Quaker grammar school in Eglesfield at the age of 12. As a teacher, he used rudiments of math, Greek, and Latin from 2 mentors: Elihu Robinson, a fellow Quaker with interest in science, and John Gough, a math scholar. He became an English meteorologist and chemist that was a pioneer in the development of modern atomic theory. -
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Life of James Clerk Maxwell and his Works
He is a Scottish physicist who is regarded as the most influential 1800 physician to affect 1900. He is ranked with Newton and Albert Einstein for the fundamental nature of his contributions, but he is best known for his formulation of electromagnetic theory based on Michael Faraday's observations of the electric and magnetic lines of force. This later allowed Einstien to say that Maxwell's work was “the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.” -
Work of J.J Thomson
He entered physics at an important time in its history. This is because of the discovery of electricity, magnetism, and thermodynamics, people thought that physics was coming to an end but by 1914 a new physics had come up. this excited anyone who was involved, J.J Thomson was at the forefront with less than a dozen other physicists. This was Thomson's most important work, which was occasionally interrupted by lectures at Princeton University. He can be described as "the man who split the atom". -
J.J Thomson's Atom
In conclusion to his important work in 1997, he said that all matter contained particles of the same kind that are smaller than the atoms, 1/1000. He called them corpuscles, this was changed to electrons. His discovery was an attempt to resolve the controversy of cathode rays. He used an improved vacuum technique to convince the masses that these rays were composed of particles and these rays were the same as the metals that were used as conductors and gases that carried an electric discharge. -
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Life of J.J Thomson
He was born in Cheetham Hill and enrolled in Oxens College in 1870. In 1876 he entered Trinity College in Cambridge as a minor scholar. he stayed in the college for the rest of his life, even after getting his 1st and 2nd prizemen. He was always interested in the atomic structure. This was shown in his Adams Prize in 1884 and in his published books which Maxwell's showcased in his famous "Treatise". In 1896 he went to America and published 4 lectures that he gave about his current researches. -
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Life Of Planck
He was born into an intellectual family with 3 generations all of theology professors. He was born during war times and moved to Munich in 1867 because of the 2nd Schleswig War in 1864. He inrolled into the Maximilians gymnasium school where he went under tutelage Herman Muller, a mathematician that taught him astronomy, mechanics, and math which became his entry into physics. he graduated at 17 and studied physics against what his professor told him that physics has been exhausted. -
Work of Ernest Rutherford
He is considered to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday and was the central figure in the study of radioactivity. With his concept of the nuclear atom, he was a pioneer of nuclear physics. He found that a needle can be used to detect electromagnetic waves. So he spent a while in improving this needle with the thought of its commercial uses but was outdone by Gugliemo Maroni, inventor of the wireless telegraph in 1896. He worked with Thomson on the investigation of ionization. -
Bohr Rutherford Atomic Model
He gave an undergraduate named Ernest Marsden a research project to look for large-angle scattering with alpha particles. Marsden found that when he shot a lot of alpha particles in a direction, somewhere redirected to more than a 90-degree angle. To understand why such a heavy charged particle can change its projection so drastically must mean that the atom was not a solid object, but full of space with its mass concentrated in a tiny nucleus. This insight was named the Rutherford atomic model -
Work of Ernest Rutherford II
His research abilities won him a professorship at McGill University where he partnered with Soddy to discover the decay of atoms. He wrote a textbook on radioactivity and excepted many students into his lab. He later accepted an offer to the Univerity of Manchester where he partnered with Royd to isolate some alpha particles and discover that they were helium ions. He was also visited by Baltwood to calculate the precise value of Avogadro's number for the rate of production of helium by radium. -
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Life of Ernest Rutherford
He was born in New Zealand as the 4th child and 2nd son of James Rutherford and started school in 1886 where he won a scholarship to Collegiate school. He excelled in everything, especially in math and science. He got another scholarship to Canterbury College. After 3 years there, he got an (M.A) and first-class honours in physical science, math, and mathematical physics. His 4th year he got a (B.S) with his research of high-frequency electrical discharge. -
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Life of Einstein
He was a German mathematician and physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity, in 1921, winning the Nobel Prize. His father made an engineering company that mass-produced electrical equipment that he was part of in his youth. He was alienated in his first school in Luipold Gymnasium in Munich but during his teens, he made his first major paper through the influence of his informal tutor Max Talmud. He became a school dropout and draft dodger when he was coming of age. -
Work of Einstein
Due to his incredible mathematics and physics score on the entrance exam, he got into the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology but since he was a dropout he had to go back and complete his pre-university education in Aarau. After his graduation, he could not find work because he alienated himself from his professors to self-study. In 1902 he got a clerk position in a Swiss patent office. Here he cemented his principle of relativity by further exploring ideas that he had. -
Bohr's Atom
Rutherford and his team figured out that an atom has a heavy positively charged nucleus with lighter negatively charged electrons circling it. This at the time would be unstable, so Bohr looked deeper into it. He created a way to look at the electromagnetic radiation that happened from the jump of electrons to a lower-energy orbit. This can only be possible if Rutherford's model was right. This was called Bohr atomic theory -
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Life of Bohr
He was the 2nd of 3 kids in the family which was an upper-middle-class. His father was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physics twice as a physician. Bohr enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1903 to undoubtedly study physics. He is regarded as a pioneer for physics in the 20th century and the 1st to apply the quantum concept to the problem of atomic and molecular structure for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. -
Work of Schrödinger
In his papers, he talked about the partial differential equation, which is the basic equation of quantum mechanics. These equations look a lot like Newton's equation of motion and the mechanics of the atom that he later made. He took Bohr's atom model and used a mathematical equation to find the location of an electron. This became known as the quantum mechanical model of the atom. -
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Life of Schrödinger
He was a theoretical physicist who contributed to the wave theory of matter and other fundamentals of quantum mechanics. He entered the University of Vienna in 1906 and obtained his doctorate in 1910. He accepted a research post right after this at the Universities 2nd physics institute but after his war services in WWI he moved to a different University called the University of Zurich in 1921. Here he produced the papers that gave the foundations of quantum wave mechanics in 1926. -
Chadwick Atom
To study Transmutation, they bombarded the atoms with alpha particles and watched the atom. Here is where he discovered the proton in the nucleus of atoms. This worked for Hydrogen and some other atoms but when he tried it with beryllium, unknown radiation was released that ejected protons from the nuclei of various substances. He interpreted it as being particles of mass approximately equal to the proton but without a charge-neutrons. this would be a new tool for inducing atomic disintegration. -
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Life of Chadwick
He was born in Manchester, England and went to University there. This is where he studied under Rutherford and earned a master's degree in 1913. Later he studied under Hans Geiger at the Technische Hochschule, Berlin. During WWI he became a civilian prisoner of war but later went back to study under Rutherford after the war's end. Later he received his doctorate and became assistant director. As assistant director, Chadwick studied the transmutation of elements with Rutherford. -
deBroglie Atom
In 1924 he developed his revolutionary theory of the electron wave which showed why the Bohr model was able to work. It answered the question of the motion of electrons within the atom. It also extended Eintetin's proposal to matter. The idea that matter on the atomic scale might have the properties of a wave was proposed by Einstein 20 years before. He had suggested that light of short wavelengths might under some conditions be observed to behave as if it were composed of particles. -
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Life of deBroglie
He was the 2nd son of a member of the French nobility. He broke family tradition by going into science because up until then, his family had high-ranking soldiers, politicians, and diplomats. He was following his family tradition until a major conflict when he decided to go solely into physics. He always liked the theoretical part of physics. He helped his brother, who was also a physician but died after contributing to the discovery of the atomic nucleus, from time to time. -
Work of Planck
He performed his only experiments at the University of Munich. Studying the diffusion of hydrogen through heated platinum but soon transferred to theoretical physics. In 1877 he went to the Friedrich Wilhelms University and studied physics under Hermann von Helmholtz, an unprepared boring professor and close friend, and Gustav Kirchoff, a prepared but monotonous professor. while at the University he entered a self-study program of Clausius's writing that led him to into the thermodynamics field. -
Pauli Atom
He gained high praise from Einstein and fame for his review of the theory of relativity but his greatest achievement was when he introduced 2 new numbers that helped make the Pauli exclusion principle, this states that in an atom no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. This became the foundation for the branch of quantum statistics named Fermi-Dirac statistics. He also helped others with his critical input, getting named "conscience of physics" for his great insight. -
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Life of Pauli
He was an Austrian born Physicist who was raised among the intellectual elite of Vienna which was one of the important centres for physics of its time. His godfather/mentor was a physicist-philosopher named Ernst Mach. Mach's influence in his life was an anti-metaphysical baptism. Using his remarkable mathematical abilities, he learned the theory of relativity and wrote his 1st paper at the age of 18. Next, he enrolled in physics at the University of Munich where he studied advanced physics. -
Heisenberg Atom
After he visited Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, he formulating quantum mechanics in terms of matrices and in discovering the uncertainty principle, which states that a particle's position and momentum cannot both be known exactly. To do this he had to and talk to Bohr to figure out how to find both at the same time. This was deemed impossible so he stated the opposite, which became the uncertainty principle. -
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Life of Heisenberg
He is German and his father was a scholar in ancient Greek philosophy and modern Greek literature. In 1911 Heisenberg entered the Maximilian-Gymnasium to impress his teachers with his precocity in math. He entered the University if Munich in 1920 and became a student of Arnold Summerfield to study atomic spectroscopy and exponent on the quantum model of physics. He then finished his work for a doctorate in 1923 with a dissertation on hydrodynamics. -
Planks Contributions
He is famous for being the creator of quantum theory that revolutionized our understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. With Einstein's theory of relativity, they make up the core theories of 20th-century physics. He believed that the 2nd law of thermodynamics was an absolute law like the law of conservation of energy. This led him to discover Planck's constant in 1900. He was also hailed for creating Planck's radiation law by combining Wein's law and it's destruction in low frequencies. -
Einstein Atom
This year became known as the miracle year for Einstein. He published 4 papers that revolutionized physics and was 1 of the best-known journals of the era. two of them were about his well-known E=MC2 and the special theory of relativity. while the other 2 were on the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. This helped him find the exitance of atoms mathematically, which helped revolutionize all the sciences through the use of statistics and probability.
