James Chadwick's Atomic Model

James Chadwick was a Physicist during the 1900’s who was born and raised in England. He attended Manchester High School and Manchester University. He then was awarded the Exhibition Scholarship and attended a school in Berlin, Germany. This placed him in Germany at the very beginning of World War I, where he was held a civilian prisoner of war for four years. Once he was finally free, he returned to England to work with Ernest Rutherford in Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. Together, they were an unstoppable duo, inventing a new, complex idea that was later named the neutron. In the beginning of the Twentieth Century the atom was imagined of two types of particles: protons and electrons. The problem with thinking in these terms was that the atomic mass measurements were not matching up with the atomic number, or protons in the nucleus of an atom. An example of this is the helium atom who has the atomic mass of 4, but a positive charge of two and negative charge of two. Positive charges have mass, however, electrons have very little, which made it problematic to explain the reasoning behind the atomic mass and atomic number not corresponding. A popular explanation at the time was that there were electrons and additional protons in the …show more content…
The overall charges of the atoms/molecules remained the same, but now, by adding neutrons to the mix of protons and electrons, there is no longer confusion of why the atomic mass and atomic number do not correspond with one another. In time, Chadwick’s contribution of neutrons to science helped in copious ways. One being the evidence behind Einstein’s equation E=mc2, which consisted of bombarding other nuclei (since neutrons do not repel unlike similarly-charged particles) to split the nucleus and release large amounts of energy. In reward for the huge contribution, James Chadwick received the Nobel Prize in