-
470 BCE
Plato
A Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. -
460 BCE
Democritus
An Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomic theory of the universe. Democritus was born in Abdera, Thrace, around 460 BC, although there are disagreements about the exact year. -
364 BCE
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. -
1543
Solar System Model
Solar System models, especially mechanical models, called orreries, that illustrate the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System have been built for centuries. While they often showed relative sizes, these models were usually not built to scale. -
The Alchemists
Alchemy was based on the belief that there are four basic elements in nature: air, fire, water and earth. Alchemy is an ancient practice shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Its practitioners mainly sought to turn lead into gold, a quest that has captured the imaginations of people for thousands of years. -
Robert Boyle
An Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. -
Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution, was a French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and who had a large influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology. -
John Dalton
John Dalton FRS was an English chemist, physicist, and meteorologist. He is best known for introducing the atomic theory into chemistry, and for his research into color blindness, sometimes referred to as Daltonism in his honor. -
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is best remembered for formulating the Periodic Law and creating a farsighted version of the periodic table of elements. -
J.J. Thomson
Sir Joseph John Thomson OM PRS was a British physicist and Nobel Laureate in Physics, credited with the discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be discovered. -
Solid Sphere of "Billiard Bill" Model
Because Dalton thought atoms were the smallest particles of matter, he envisioned them as solid, hard spheres, like billiard (pool) balls, so he used wooden balls to model them. -
The Curies
Marie Curie was a physicist, chemist and a pioneer in the study of radiation. She and her husband, Pierre, discovered the elements polonium and radium. They and Henri Becquerel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, and Marie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. -
"Plum Pudding" Model
The plum pudding model is one of several historical scientific models of the atom. -
Robert Millikan
Robert Andrews Millikan was an American experimental physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary electric charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect. Millikan graduated from Oberlin College in 1891 and obtained his doctorate at Columbia University in 1895. -
Ernest Rutherford
A New Zealand–born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopedia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday. -
Henry G.J. Mosely
Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra. -
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. -
Neils Bohr
Was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding the atomic structure and the quantum theory. -
Werner Heisenburg
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. -
Electron Could Model
The electron cloud model was developed in 1925 by Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. The model is a way to help visualize the most probable position of electrons in an atom. The electron cloud model is the current accepted model of an atom.
