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John Dalton
John Dalton's experiments on gases led to the discovery that the total pressure of a mixture of gases amounted to the sum of the partial pressures that each individual gas exerted while occupying the same space. -
Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford found a simpler and more practical way to detect radio waves than previously before. -
J.J. Thomson
J.J. Thomson studied the cathode rays which resulted in the discovery of the electron. -
Marie Curie
Marie Curie discovered that rays remained constant, no matter the form of uranium. The rays came from the element's atomic structure. This revolutionary idea created the field of atomic physics and she used the word radioactivity to describe what was happening. -
Henry Moseley
Henry Moseley produced the outcomes of his measurements of the wavelengths of the X-ray spectral lines which showed that the ordering of the wavelengths of the X-ray emissions of the elements coincided with the ordering of the elements by atomic number. -
Francis Aston
Francis Aston created the spectograph. A spectograph was a type of positive ray apparatus which uses magnetic and electrostatic fields producing opposite deflections in the same place to convert molecules into ions and then sorts the ions by their mass-to-charge ratio. -
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr received a Nobel Prize in1922 in Physics for his work on atomic structures. Combining Rutherford's description of the nucleus and Planck's theory about quanta, Bohr explained what happens inside an atom and was able to develop a picture of atomic structure. -
Erwin Schrodinger
In Niels Bohr's theory of the atom, the electrons absorb and emit radiation of fixed wavelengths when jumping between the fixed orbits around a nucleus. -
James Chadwick
James Chadwick proved the existence of neutrons. Alpha rays are charged, and therefore repelled by the electrical forces present in the nuclei of heavy atoms. -
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann developed the concept of strangeness for particles. With a quantum number some hadrons decay rapidly by the strong nuclear force while others decay more slowly by the weak force.
