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In 460 B.C. Greek philosopher, Democritus, developed the idea of atoms.
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In the 1800's John Dalton performed experiments to show matter.
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An English physicist named J.J. Thomson discovered the electron and decided to make a model for the structure of the atom.
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A professor named Max Planck, a professor of theoretical physics showed that when you vibrate atoms you can measure the energy.
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Albert Einstein wrote a very important paper explaining that light absorbtion can release electrons from atoms.
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Rutherford did an experiment with atoms and alpha rays thinking he could investigate the inside of an atom. He figured that they get scattered by little bits of positively charged matter.
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In 1912 Niels Bohr came up with a theory that electrons don't spiral into the nucleus and came up with some things that do happen. Rule 1 was that Electrons can orbit only at certain allowed distances from the nucleus. Rule 2 was Atoms radiate energy when an electron jumps from a higher-energy orbit to a lower-energy orbit.
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In 1924 Wolfgang Pauli predicted that an electron should spin around the nucleus.
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Erwin Schrödinger had the idea to form a model of an atom. There was no way to tell if this was accurate because nothing compares with it.