Abstract
The ancient Greek idea of atoms as the basic building blocks of matter is consolidated by the work of Dalton, Lavoisier, and Mendeleev. Rutherford shows that the atom has a nucleus, and the new science of atomic spectroscopy leads to the Bohr-Rutherford model of the atom and the “old” quantum theory . Modern quantum mechanics is used to explain the distribution of electrons about the atoms. The nucleus itself is found to have an internal structure, and the concepts of nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, nuclear forces and nuclear models are explained. The synthesis of the elements in the stars is discussed.
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
Democritus of Abdera
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Notes
- 1.
Helios, in Greek.
- 2.
Strictly speaking these quantities should be called atomic masses, and that is the current practice. However in 19th century chemistry the definitions were not so precise.
- 3.
Helium was not discovered on earth until the end of the nineteenth century.
- 4.
In the United States of America it apparently became known as the blueberry muffin model.
- 5.
This is an application of an exclusion principle formulated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1925.
- 6.
For instance, the ratio of frequencies of notes an octave apart are 2:1, for a perfect fifth: 3:2, for a perfect fourth: 4:3, for a major third: 5:4, for a minor third: 6:5.
- 7.
This image has been slightly modified from the image uploaded by Florian Marquardt to Wikimedia Commons and made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAtomOrbitals.png).
- 8.
The number of protons in an atom is known as its “atomic number, Z.” The sum of the atomic number and the number of neutrons, N, in an atom is its “mass number”, A.
- 9.
This image was obtained from Wikimedia Commons and made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Table_isotopes_en.svg).
- 10.
The half-life of a radioactive isotope is the time required for half of its mass to undergo radioactive decay.
- 11.
These are nuclei with Z > 92 which have been created in reactors or with nuclear accelerators.
- 12.
The critical mass of a fissile material depends on its surrounds and whether they reflect the emitted neutrons back into the material, but is of the order of ten kilograms.
- 13.
The force of gravity is too small by many orders of magnitude to achieve this purpose.
- 14.
By this statement we mean that the force between two nucleons will be different if a third nucleon is in their vicinity.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Barrett, R., Delsanto, P.P., Tartaglia, A. (2016). Atomic and Nuclear Physics. In: Physics: The Ultimate Adventure. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31691-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31691-8_9
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