The
Beginning of the Nuclear age
Introduction:
Nuclear Science is a broad topic which has only about 100 years old.
It covers Nuclear physics, the study of the structure of atoms and the
interaction of particles and energies, to the use of radioactive
material as an alternative energy.
It is a wonderful and interesting topic which has inspired many great
physicists. To trace our roots on our discovery of Nuclear Science we have
to start with how elements were first discovered.
Atoms and Elements:
The beginning
In 1808, the English scientist John Dalton began to carefully
study common chemical reactions. He synthesized what he had recorded and
observed that chemicals could combine only in specific whole-number ratios.
He found that:
-
there was a certain minimum amount of any chemical that couldn't
be broken down any further.(Elements)
-
only a whole atom could combine with another atom, no partial atoms
Further, from his proportions he was able to find the relative weights
of the elements and ranked them accordingly.
As chemists continued to experiment with elements they noticed that
certain elements shared similar properties with others. In the 1860's,
the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev created a table which arranged the
lists of elements according to their properties. The arrangement of elements
has become known has the periodic table because the chemical characteristics
repeated periodically down the columns.
By the 1890's the theories of Dalton and Mendeleyev had provided a lot
research but it did not explain much. Chemists in this time did not understand
what made different atoms of different elements behave differently.
Could different atoms be different in structure some how? Despite such
questions, the achievements of 19th century physicists were impressive
and provided enough explanatory value to give a notion that physics had
come to an end.
Instead, starting in 1895, a new mystery was unfolded, the discoveries
of X-rays, nuclear radiation and atomic particles. This would revolutionize
our understanding of nature at its deepest level.
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