How scientists discovered atoms
How scientists discovered atoms
Learn about the discovery of atoms and the instruments scientists use to see these small particles.
© American Chemical Society (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Transcript
It's hard to imagine just how tiny atoms are. One sheet of paper is roughly half a million atoms thick. Volume wise, one atom is as small compared to an apple as that apple is to the entire earth. So you might be surprised to learn that chemists can actually see atoms, not with their eyes, with incredibly precise tools.
The idea of atoms stretches back to ancient Greece when the philosopher Democritus declared that all matter is made of tiny particles. The philosopher Plato even decided-- wrongly-- that different substances had different shaped atoms, like pyramids or cubes. The first modern evidence for atoms appears in the early 1800s when British chemist John Dalton discovered that chemicals always contain whole number ratios of atoms. That's why it's H2O and not it's H20.4O or H square root of 17O.
The reason for these whole numbers, Dalton suggested, was because you can't have a half of an atom or 0.2 atoms, only whole atoms. It's actually kind of hard to imagine chemistry today without Dalton's insight, but it was controversial during its day. Why? Because chemists couldn't see atoms. Many considered them like negative numbers-- useful for calculating things, but not existing in the real world. Even Dmitri Mendeleev, father of the periodic table, refused to believe in atoms for many years.
So why didn't chemists just look for atoms under microscopes? To see something under a microscope, the wavelength of light you're shining through the microscope can't be larger than whatever you're looking at. Unfortunately, visible light is thousands of times bigger than atoms. So chemists had to wait for a light with short wavelengths, like X-rays.
X-rays were discovered in the 1890s by German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen, who realized that photographs taken with X-rays allowed him to see through objects. Roentgen thought he'd gone insane when he saw this. But today we're all familiar with X-rays from trips to the dentist and doctor.
Chemists don't use X-rays to see through things, however. Instead, they bounce X-rays off things like crystals, which are solids with layers of atoms. When X-rays hit an atom in the crystal, they bounce back. Others slip through and bounce off the second layer down or the third layer or deeper. After being reflected, these X-rays strike a detector screen like the ball bouncing back in Pong. And based on the pattern of where they strike the wall, scientists can work backward and figure out the 3D arrangement of atoms in the crystal. This reflection and interaction of light rays is called diffraction.
X-ray diffraction, sometimes called X-ray crystallography, has led to dozens of Nobel prizes for chemists since the 1920s. It also led to one of the biggest discoveries in science history-- the structure of DNA. James Watson and Francis Crick get credit nowadays. But they based their work on the work of Rosalind Franklin, a crystallographer in England.
She began taking X-ray pictures of DNA in 1952. And Watson's glimpse of one picture, photograph 51, was a vital clue in determining that DNA was a double helix. This incident actually remains controversial today because Franklin never gave Watson permission to view photograph 51.
If X-rays let chemists peer at the structure of atoms, scanning tunneling microscopes finally revealed the atoms themselves. Rather than bounce light off something, an STM runs a sharp needle over the surface. It's like chemical braille except the tip never quite touches. As the tip moves along the surface, scientists can reconstruct the atomic landscape, making individual atoms visible at last in the early 1980s.
Lo and behold, the atoms weren't Plato's cubes and pyramids but spheres of different sizes. By 1989, a few scientists had even adapted STM technology to manipulate xenon atoms and spell out words. We'll let you guess what company they worked for. Also in 1989, the chemist Ahmed Zewail moved beyond looking at stationary atoms and developed tools to see atoms in action.
Zewail wanted to study how atoms break bonds and swap partners during reactions. So he developed the world's fastest camera, which shoot pulses of laser light a few femtoseconds long, a few billionths of a microsecond. While Zewail's laser flashed like a strobe, his camera snapped pictures. Zewail then ran the pictures together like a slow motion replay. Since then, femtochemistry has provided insight into everything from ozone depletion to the working of the human retina. Zewail won a Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry in 1999.
The ancient Greeks dreamed up fanciful shapes for atoms, but it took 2,400 years before scientists could see them for real and study their behavior. Seeing truly is believing for human beings, and it was chemists and other scientists who fulfilled this need and finally revealed what our universe is made of.
The idea of atoms stretches back to ancient Greece when the philosopher Democritus declared that all matter is made of tiny particles. The philosopher Plato even decided-- wrongly-- that different substances had different shaped atoms, like pyramids or cubes. The first modern evidence for atoms appears in the early 1800s when British chemist John Dalton discovered that chemicals always contain whole number ratios of atoms. That's why it's H2O and not it's H20.4O or H square root of 17O.
The reason for these whole numbers, Dalton suggested, was because you can't have a half of an atom or 0.2 atoms, only whole atoms. It's actually kind of hard to imagine chemistry today without Dalton's insight, but it was controversial during its day. Why? Because chemists couldn't see atoms. Many considered them like negative numbers-- useful for calculating things, but not existing in the real world. Even Dmitri Mendeleev, father of the periodic table, refused to believe in atoms for many years.
So why didn't chemists just look for atoms under microscopes? To see something under a microscope, the wavelength of light you're shining through the microscope can't be larger than whatever you're looking at. Unfortunately, visible light is thousands of times bigger than atoms. So chemists had to wait for a light with short wavelengths, like X-rays.
X-rays were discovered in the 1890s by German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen, who realized that photographs taken with X-rays allowed him to see through objects. Roentgen thought he'd gone insane when he saw this. But today we're all familiar with X-rays from trips to the dentist and doctor.
Chemists don't use X-rays to see through things, however. Instead, they bounce X-rays off things like crystals, which are solids with layers of atoms. When X-rays hit an atom in the crystal, they bounce back. Others slip through and bounce off the second layer down or the third layer or deeper. After being reflected, these X-rays strike a detector screen like the ball bouncing back in Pong. And based on the pattern of where they strike the wall, scientists can work backward and figure out the 3D arrangement of atoms in the crystal. This reflection and interaction of light rays is called diffraction.
X-ray diffraction, sometimes called X-ray crystallography, has led to dozens of Nobel prizes for chemists since the 1920s. It also led to one of the biggest discoveries in science history-- the structure of DNA. James Watson and Francis Crick get credit nowadays. But they based their work on the work of Rosalind Franklin, a crystallographer in England.
She began taking X-ray pictures of DNA in 1952. And Watson's glimpse of one picture, photograph 51, was a vital clue in determining that DNA was a double helix. This incident actually remains controversial today because Franklin never gave Watson permission to view photograph 51.
If X-rays let chemists peer at the structure of atoms, scanning tunneling microscopes finally revealed the atoms themselves. Rather than bounce light off something, an STM runs a sharp needle over the surface. It's like chemical braille except the tip never quite touches. As the tip moves along the surface, scientists can reconstruct the atomic landscape, making individual atoms visible at last in the early 1980s.
Lo and behold, the atoms weren't Plato's cubes and pyramids but spheres of different sizes. By 1989, a few scientists had even adapted STM technology to manipulate xenon atoms and spell out words. We'll let you guess what company they worked for. Also in 1989, the chemist Ahmed Zewail moved beyond looking at stationary atoms and developed tools to see atoms in action.
Zewail wanted to study how atoms break bonds and swap partners during reactions. So he developed the world's fastest camera, which shoot pulses of laser light a few femtoseconds long, a few billionths of a microsecond. While Zewail's laser flashed like a strobe, his camera snapped pictures. Zewail then ran the pictures together like a slow motion replay. Since then, femtochemistry has provided insight into everything from ozone depletion to the working of the human retina. Zewail won a Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry in 1999.
The ancient Greeks dreamed up fanciful shapes for atoms, but it took 2,400 years before scientists could see them for real and study their behavior. Seeing truly is believing for human beings, and it was chemists and other scientists who fulfilled this need and finally revealed what our universe is made of.