Science is all about models. How does this whole model-science-thing work? Basically you have a model for how something works. When more data is collected, the model sometimes has to be changed. This is what is cool about looking at previous models of the atom. You can see how things have change. Since the Rutherford model of the atom is now 100 years old, I figured it would be a good idea to see how this model came to be and what happened after that.

Where to start? How about with the Greeks?

Above:

Maybe the Greeks did more philosophy than science. They thought about things, but they rarely compared their ideas with experimental evidence. But what did they think about matter? One of the philosophers that was known to think about this (because of course there were others, but maybe they didn’t have a blog) was Democritus. Here is a picture of him.

At the time, Democritus and his buddies were thinking about matter. They wondered what would happen if you keep taking something (like a tree) and breaking into smaller and smaller pieces? Would it always be a piece of a tree? Could you keep breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces? Democritus said that if you keep breaking it down, you would get to a size that could no longer be broken. This would be the indivisible piece. In Greek, atomos = indivisible. Thus, the atom. (I know there is more to the Greeks, but I need a place to start)

I like to think of this early Greek atomic model as the Lego model. Look at these awesome Lego models.

There are two ways to think about these two objects. If you break the space shuttle down, you get more space shuttle. The Democritus way says that if you break it down, you get Lego blocks (or Lego atoms since you can’t break a brick). Notice that I didn’t say Legos – that is not an allowable word.