Related papers: Early Atomic Models - From Mechanical to Quantum (…
The scope of this paper is to discuss the major works that appeared in the period of 1904 to 1913: atomic models proposed by Thomson and Hantaro Nagaoka (1904), Rutherford (1911), and Bohr (1913), and the experimental work that motivated…
Most physics textbooks at college and university level introduce quantum physics in a historical context. However, the textbook version of this history does not match the actual history. In this article, the first in a series of articles…
The atomic model that Niels Bohr suggested in 1913 celebrated its greatest victories in connection with one-electron atoms. Among them were the isotopic spectral effect and what became known as Rydberg atoms, insights that were fully…
Modern atomic and nuclear physics took its start in the early part of the twentieth century, to a large extent based upon experimental investigations of radioactive phenomena. Foremost among the pioneers of the new kind of physics was…
The idea of atoms is old but X-rays provided the first probe into the physical atom. Photographs of X-ray scattering from crystals -Laue spots- were the first visual proof for the physical existence of atoms arranged in a perfect geometric…
The discovery of atomic nucleus by E. Rutherford, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the Nuclear Physics original landmark. From then, a series of experiments in which beams of particles composed of neutrons, protons and others,…
The quantum theory of Bohr has roots in the theories of Rutherford and J. J. Thomson on the one hand, and that of Nicholson on the other. We note that Bohr neither presented the theories of Rutherford and Thomson faithfully, nor did he…
Superconductors have often been described as `giant atoms'. The simplest description of atoms that heralded their quantum understanding was proposed by Bohr in 1913. The Bohr atom starts from some simple assumptions and deduces that the…
The emergence of quantum theory in the early decades of the twentieth century was accompanied by a wide range of popular science books, all of which presented in words and in images new scientific ideas about the structure of the atom. The…
This paper explores the historical development of the theory of quantum mechanics between 1900 and 1927 by chronological examination of the foundational papers and ideas. Beginning with Planck's introduction of energy quantisation in…
Planck's introduction of the quantum of action in 1900 was followed by 25 years of trial and error in quest of the understanding of the quantum world; different ideas and directions had to be pursued until the path leading to the elementary…
We review Bohr's atomic model and its extension by Sommerfeld from a mathematical perspective of wave mechanics. The derivation of quantization rules and energy levels is revisited using semiclassical methods. Sommerfeld-type integrals are…
"I have dealt with many different transformations with various periods of time, but the quickest that I have met was my own transformation in one moment from a physicist to a chemist." Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Banquet, 1908) This article is…
The purpose of this work is to retrace the steps that were made by scientists of XX century, like Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, for the formulation of what today represents the modern quantum mechanics and that, within two…
We discuss, from a historiographical point of view, which was the degree of certainty that the physicists directly involved in the birth of Quantum Mechanics (Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Dirac and Schr\"odinger) gave to the atomistic…
It is widely known that Paul Ehrenfest formulated and applied his adiabatic hypothesis in the early 1910s. Niels Bohr, in his first attempt to construct a quantum theory in 1916, used it for fundamental purposes in a paper which eventually…
We review here the main contributions of Einstein to the quantum theory. To put them in perspective we first give an account of Physics as it was before him. It is followed by a brief account of the problem of black body radiation which…
The Rutherford scattering experiment, conceived by Ernest Rutherford and carried out by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, provided the first direct evidence of a compact atomic nucleus, fundamentally altering the understanding of atomic…
Ever since the advent of quantum mechanics, it has been clear that the atoms composing matter do not obey Newton's laws. Instead, their behavior is described by the Schroedinger equation. Surprisingly though, until recently, no clear…
An historical overview is given of the relevant steps that allowed the genesis of the quantum theory of the chemical bond, starting from the appearance of the new quantum mechanics and following later developments till approximately 1931.…