Atom Dbq Essay

People find out new things about the world every day. Scientific findings are almost never final. Experiments can verify or shatter what we perceive as facts of life. Atoms are an example of this. Thinkers and scientists from throughout time have been theorizing and experimenting to find out what an atom is made of. The structure of an atom is very complex, and because of that, its known structure has drastically changed over time. What we know as an atom today is composed of many subatomic particles. There is a positively charged center in an atom called the nucleus, which contains protons and neutrons (Doc. 3). The number of protons determine what element the atom is, and the number of neutrons influences the atom’s mass. There are also negatively charged particles, called electrons, to counteract the positive charge of the nucleus. These electrons fly around the atom’s empty space, which the atom is mostly made of (Doc. 2). The electrons are in groups called electron clouds, and these electron clouds help the atom bond with other atoms (Doc. 3, OI). These findings that we know today have been contributed to by many scientists of the past. …show more content…
(Doc. 1). They named their new idea ‘atomos’, meaning indivisible (OI). Sadly, their idea would be unsupported until 1803, when John Dalton published his atomic theory of matter. It stated that all matter was made of atoms, the atom is indivisible and indestructible, and that compounds are made up of two or more different kinds of atoms (OI). Years later, in 1911, Ernest Rutherford performed his gold-foil experiment and concluded that the atom has a positively charged nucleus and is mostly empty space (Doc 1, OI). This finding is almost the modern model, with the exception of the electron cloud (Doc.