Timeline for the Long-Standing Question: Is there an Underlying Structure that Connects all Matter?

By rartley
  • Jan 1, 1492

    Historical Happening

    Christopher Columbus reached North America, which he thought would be India.

  • Historical Happening

    WIlliam Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is performed for the first time; he finishes writing "The Merchant of Venice."

  • Historical Happening

    The now-United States of America declared freedom from Britain.
  • Period: to

    Years

  • Historical Happening

    Beethoven finishes writing his Piano Sonata no. 14 in C# minor, Op. 27, no. 2.

  • John Dalton

    Announced atomic theory: 1. All matter is made of atoms. Atoms are indivisible and indestructible. 2. All atoms of a given element are identical in mass and properties. 3. Compounds are formed by a combination of two or more different kinds of atoms. 4. A chemical reaction is a rearrangement of atoms.

  • Historical Happening

    The War of 1812 began between the United States and Britain.

  • J.J. Thompson

    He discovered electrons, and that they were 1/1000 the size of an atom. He also developed the incorrect raisin bread/plum pudding model in which electrons sat in a positively-charged atom base.

  • Max Planck

    He found the relationship between energy and frequency, Planck's constant, which is 6.63 x 10^-34 J-s, represented as h in the formula e = f x h. (e is energy and f is frequency)

  • Ernest Rutherford and James Soddy

    They found the "disintegration theory," stating that radioactive decay is an atomic process as opposed to a molecular one.

  • Hantaro Nagaoka

    He developed the Saturnian model of an atom, a 3D version in which the electrons orbited a nucleus of protons and neutrons on various planes.

  • Robert Millikan

    He found that the electron was negatively charged through his oil drop experiment.

  • Ernest Rutherford

    He came up with a theory of the "nucleus" in atoms, realizing that it is positively-charged.

  • Niels Bohr

    He discovered that electrons travel in orbitrs around the nucleus. He also created the Bohr model for an atom to show that discovery in pictures.

  • James Chadwick

    Chadwick discovered neutrons.

  • Louis de Broglie

    de Broglie defined the wave-particle duality of nature, that waves and particles behave as each other do. He also found the mathematical relationship between the momentum of a particle and the wavelength it coincides with.

  • Werner Heisenberg

    He discovered the "uncertainty principle", that it is impossible to measure the velocity and position of an electron at the same time.

  • Erwin Schrodinger

    He put his cat in a box with radioactive material and a vial of poison gas. There was a 50% chance that the material would decay, release and electron which would break the vial, and kill the cat. He found that until the box is open, the cat is both alive and dead, in an "indeterminate state." He used a quantum mechanical model to prove that electrons are actually waves. The electrons only look like they are moving, but in all truth they are waves.