RIZAL TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

Cities of Mandaluyong and Pasig

MODULE 1 – AN INTRODUCTION TO CHEMISTRY

Lesson 1 – Development of Atomic Structure

At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• Review the timeline of the development of atomic structure and compare it with
the Philippine historical events.

TOPIC DISCUSSION

A. Ancient Greek Philosophers

We can start studying Chemistry by knowing the contributions of Greek philosophers
who were curious of the things around us. There are five notable philosophers in Ancient
Greece namely Leucippus, Democritus, Empedocles, Plato, and Aristotle.

Leucippus and his student Democritus were

two of the most important theorists about the natural
and physical world. They were called physicists in
Ancient Greece. They considered the idea of
atomism, or the idea that things are made up of
much smaller things that cannot be changed nor
divided. Among the features of their theory were the
following:

• Atoms make up most of the things in the universe; where there are no atoms, there is
a void.
• Atoms are incredibly small and cannot be divided, hence a tomos (not to be cut).
• Atoms themselves are solid, homogeneous and cannot change.
• Atoms moving about and colliding in the void cause the changes we see in our
universe.
• The shapes, sizes and weights of individual atoms influence the characteristics of the
thing they make up, that is, sharp atoms cause our tongues to tear and make bitter or
sour tastes.

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Another theory by a Greek philosopher

named Empédocles stated that everything is
made up of four eternal and unchanging kinds
of matter, fire, air (all gases), water (all liquids
and metals) and earth (all solids).

Plato expanded Empédocles theory by saying each of the four kinds of matter is
composed of geometrical solids (the “Platonic
solids”) further divisible into triangles. When
rearranged, these triangles could cause the
apparent transformations between the four
basic kinds of matter. Cube represents Earth,
Tetrahedron for Fire, Air is represented by
Octahedron, water is represented by
icosahedron, and the universe is embodied by
dodecahedron.

Aristotle, the student of Plato, believed

that the four elements could be balanced in
substances in an infinite number of ways, and
that when combined gave proportions of
“essential qualities,” hot, dry, cold, and wet.
Transformations between the four elements (or
changes in their balance in a substance) caused
changes in the universe.

Hot is the product of Air and Fire, Dry is produced by the combination of fire and
earth; combination of earth and water produces cold; and finally, when water is combined
with air, it produces wet. The obsession with Aristotle’s ideas (and his arguments against
atomists) that prevented atomism from gaining ground.

The ideas of these Greek philosophers attracted several persons. Later, medieval folks
were also charmed by these ideas. Even though these philosophers were not Christian, their
writing and such were copied by Christian monks and have survived while so many books of
their contemporaries have not. As years went back and the Roman Empire collapsed into dark
Middle Ages, these ideas all but disappeared into the cellars of monasteries and libraries of
Eastern scholars, if they survived at all.

The rediscovery of classical texts by Aristotle and others started the renewed interest
in philosophy, art, and the natural and social sciences. Starting in 14th century Florence, the
Renaissance quickly spread out to the rest of Europe, paving the way for the early modern
time

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B. The Rebirth of Atomism

In the Renaissance period and after it,
the interest on scientific inquiry flourish
again in modern Europe. One of the front-
liners of such development is the Anglo-Irish
Philosopher named Robert Boyle. On 1611, he
proposed that there were some substances
that could not be made simpler. The idea of
atomism came in again.

Around 1789, a French man named

Antoine Lavoisier used closed vessels and
precise weight measurements in many experiments to achieve the following:
• He disproved the principle of phlogiston, where heated metals were thought to lose a
substance of negative weight. Metals, which gain weight when heated in open air,
react with oxygen air, causing it to form a calx (metal oxide).
• He showed that air is not an element because it could be separated into several
components.
• He showed that water is not an element, because it was made of two substances.
Oxygen was found to produce water when burned in the presence of “flammable air”
(a part of air that would be later called hydrogen).

Lavoisier was able to refute Aristotle’s thinking of a universe composed of three or four
kinds of matter. He had proof of Boyle’s concept of a simple substance, now known as the
chemical element. He argued that a chemical element is a substance that cannot be broken
down into simpler components. He defined a compound as a substance composed of these
elements. He came up with an initial list of 33 elements and created a systematic way of
naming elements and the compounds they created. He also wrote the first Chemistry
textbook. For this and many other contributions, he became known as the Father of Chemistry.

Concept of the element was studied by another great chemist,

John Dalton (1766-1844). He further develops the concept of the atom.
His Chemical Atomic Theory merged the concepts of the atom and
element, and formally established the two in the practice of
chemistry.
• Gases, and all chemically inseparable elements, are made of
atoms
• The atoms of an element are identical in their masses
• Atoms of different elements have different masses
• Atoms combine in small, whole number ratios

Dalton proposed his atomic theory as the best explanation to three important
observations made at the time. These three observations were replicable results of
experiments done by different scientists. Since we have enough evidence to establish these
observations as consistently occurring under certain conditions of nature, they are now

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known as laws. There are the 3 Fundamental Laws: (1) Antoine Lavoisier’s Law of
Conservation of Mass, (2) Joseph Proust’s Law of Definite Proportions, and (3) John Dalton’s
Law of Multiple Proportions.

Another notable scientist is Antoine Henri Becquerel.

He was a French engineer, physicist, and scientist. In 1895,
when Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray and its
application to medicine, Becquerel also discovered another
type of ray given off by the element Uranium. However, he
dropped this research knowing that it was dry and has less
application unlike with Roentgen’s. Nevertheless, as saying
goes “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. His
discovery was intensively studied by a Polish girl named
Marie Curie together with his husband Pierre Curie. The
Curies had proved that the “ray” observed by Becquerel is a
property of matter. With this, Becquerel and the Curies won
the Nobel Prize in 1903 for their study on radiation.

Later in 1897, Joseph John Thomson published the idea

that electricity was in particles that were part of the atom.
Experimenting with cathode rays, he established the mass and
charge properties of these particles. These particles were named
electrons. In 1904, he came up with the plum-pudding model,
which was an idea of what the atom looked like based on his
experiments.

Plum-pudding model is a sphere with a uniformly distributed positive charge and

enough embedded electrons to neutralize the positive charge. A plum pudding is a sort of
cake with raisins embedded in it. Thomson would later conclude that the electron was not the
only source of mass in the atom. This implied that the atom was composed of other particles.

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Ernest Rutherford, is a student of Thomson who was

among many who studied radioactivity. He concluded that
radioactivity occurred due to changes on a subatomic level, or
changes within the atom itself. In 1902, he worked in Thomson’s
laboratory where he distinguished two kinds of radiation based
on their penetrating power: α (alpha) and β (beta). He studied
these types of radiation and noticed, from his experiments, that
alpha particles would sometimes bounce off at a high angle when
made to penetrate a very thin gold foil.

In 1911, Rutherford theorized that the model proposed by Thomson did not explain
the deflection of alpha particles. Therefore, he devised his own model with a positive nucleus
at the center and electrons revolving like planets at a distance around it. The incredibly dense
nucleus explained the occasional deflection experienced by the alpha particles, while the
amounts of empty space in between explained why most particles were able to pass through.
Rutherford envisioned the atom as like a miniature solar system, with electrons orbiting
around a massive nucleus, and as mostly empty space, with the nucleus occupying only a
very small part of the atom.

Rutherford later concluded that the nucleus was composed of positive particles known
as protons, which were then thought to be hydrogen nuclei found in other atoms. He
suggested the possibility of finding a composite particle (proton + electron) with a negligible
electric field that composed the nucleus.

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Niels Bohr is another scientist in Rutherford’s laboratory. He

tackled one of the big issues with the Rutherford model. The system
proposed by Rutherford was unstable because, under classical physics,
the spinning electrons would tend to be attracted to the positive
nucleus and lose energy until they collapse into the center. Bohr
proposed that the electrons existed only at fixed distances from the
nucleus at set “energy levels,” or quanta. Quanta was first
conceptualized mathematically by Max Planck. Bohr also proposed
that the electrons “jumped” between energy levels by absorbing or
releasing discrete amounts of energy.

However, the Bohr model of the atom was still unable to explain why atoms bonded
in certain ways to form compounds. For example, carbon formed compounds of CH4 while
oxygen formed H2O.

There was a development of a new

branch of physics called quantum mechanics.
This branch augmented the Bohr model with
new explanations of how matter behaved at a
very tiny level that turned it into the quantum
model of the atom used today. The model is
based on mathematical equations by several
scientists, including Werner Heisenberg and
Ernest Schrödinger. In 1920s, they and other
scientists proposed the following:

• Instead of electrons being particles in the model, electrons have characteristics of both
waves and particles.
• Instead of orbits, there were orbitals or regions of space with high probability of
finding electrons. These are sometimes known as electron clouds or electron subshells
whose shapes are described by complex wave equations.
• There is no real “empty space,” but there are regions with a high or low probability of
finding an electron.

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The quantum model more accurately explains properties of elements such as the way
that atoms bond with one another. However, it made Rutherford’s proposal of composite
proton-electron particles unworkable. This is because the equations would predict that there
was a zero probability of electrons being found in the nucleus.

James Chadwick was a student of Rutherford’s who built on

this possibility in 1926. He worked on radiation emitted by
beryllium that took the form of particles heavy enough to displace
protons. These particles were as heavy as protons, but they needed
to have a neutral charge that would allow them to smash into the
nucleus without being repelled by electrons or protons. He
confirmed their existence by measuring their mass and called them
neutrons. He determined that they were single particles instead of
composite ones that Rutherford had hypothesized.

The neutron was able to explain the mass unaccounted for

by a system of protons and electrons only. It also allowed for more
far-reaching advancements in nuclear physics and chemistry. It gave an understanding of
isotopes and radioactive decay and provided the tools to synthesize new elements and
radioactive materials. These advancements, for better or for worse, changed the landscape of
science because they gave us the ability to derive large amounts of energy from splitting the
atom (nuclear fission).

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SCHOOL WORK

Activity M1.1 – Infographics

Download the file M1.1 – Infographics from e-rtu. Read the instruction carefully and perform
the indicated activity. Name your output following the format M1.1_Lastname (example,
M1.1_Dalisay) and submit/upload it to e-rtu.

REFERENCE

Book:
• Teaching Guide for Senior High School: Physical Science. The Commission on
Higher Education in collaboration with the Philippine Normal University

• Images taken from Google Image

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