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Emilie du Chatelet
Emilie was a mathematician and received education not many women at the time could have. She was rejected from academic schools because she was a women, but hired tutors to teach her about all the subjects. She dedicated her life to science, and aspired to have the same standards when it came to learning as men did. She also wrote the book "The Age of Enlightenment"
https://daily.jstor.org/emilie-du-chatelet/ -
John Dalton
Dalton's theory says elements are made of extremely small particles, atoms, atoms of an element have the same size, mass and other properties and different elements have different properties, atoms cannot be subdivided, destroyed, or created, and in chemical reactions atoms are combined, separated, and rearranged. Dalton's "rule of greatest simplicity" has no evidence and was an assumption. Despite the heart of the theory having uncertainties, principles of it survived. -
JJ Thomson
Thomson did experiments using a high-vacuum cathode-ray tube to study the nature of electric discharge. He discovered electrons, noticed that an atom can be divided, and that atoms have positive cores with negative charged particles in it. Dalton's theory that negative particles were in a positive nucleus was proven wrong, but helped pave the way for other scientists. -
Ernest Rutherford
Rutherford fired alpha particles at gold foil, and expected all of them to go though. Instead, some bounced back, and he said that atoms are made of of central charge surrounded by a cloud of orbiting electrons. Rutherford also discovered that atoms are composed of mostly empty space. Though is theory is incomplete because he did not say anything about the arrangements of electrons in an atom, his experiments were the base for future developments in quantum mechanics. -
Neils Bohr
Bohr's model shows the atom as a small, positively charged nucleus, surrounded by orbiting electrons. Very much like the solar system, but instead of gravity attraction is provided by electrostatic forces. The models success comes from explaining the Rydberg formula, which had only been known experimentally before. One of it's shortcomings is that the said value, L=ħ, for the ground state orbital angular momentum, is wrong. -
James Chadwick
Chadwick discovered neutrons in an atom. He discovered it by firing alpha particles at beryllium atoms, which produced an unknown radiation. Chadwick was a collaborator of Rutherford's model. His discovery led to the discovery of fission and eventually the atomic bomb. Because Chadwick just discovered neutrons, there has been nothing that has disproved his findings. The discovery of neutrons led to more accurate models of an atom being available to chemists. -
Lise Meitner
Meitner and two other scientists discovered that when bombarded by neutrons, uranium atoms actually split. She gave the first explanation of the fission process, but the Nobel Peace Prize for discovering nuclear fission was given to her co-collaborator Otto Hahn. Meitner was also the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. -
George Zweig
George Zweig propose that there were smaller things than atoms, which he called "aces" (after the four playing cards). He proposed his theory through a paper which explained that mesons and baryons are constructed of a set of 3 "aces". They are now known as quarks. Zweig did this independently of Murry Gell-Mann. Although he made this discovery, he is yet to get a Noble Prize. -
Vera Rubin
Vera Rubin (along with Kent Ford) contributed evidence of dark matter. They found the orbital velocity of hydrogen clouds remained constant outside the edge of the visible galaxy. Since the virial theorem was believed, they knew there must be dark matter outside the visible galaxy. According to Newton's Laws the galaxy must contain dark matter, increasing the further away you get. However, Rubin's work was not published until two years later, and she is yet to get a Nobel Prize.
