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John Dalton performed experiments where he found that matter seemed to consist of lumpy particles, although he did not know what they were.
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J.J. Thomson discovered electrons in atoms, seeing that they have a negative charge. This led him to believe that matter must also have a positive charge.
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Ernest Rutherford experimented with alpha rays put onto atoms. This led to him discovering that most of the space around atoms was indeed empty, and must have a center aka the nucleus.
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Niels Bohr created some rules which said that electrons can only orbit a certain allowed distance from the nucleus and this distance was determined by the energy of the electrons.
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Erwin Schödinger tried to form a model of an atom with particle waves. This result became very strange and interesting to the world of atoms and used the "psi" symbol for the waves.
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When I created this timeline, Nathan Day.