Question

Democritus, Dalton, Thomson, Rutherford, and Bohr all had major accomplishments in uncovering the fundamental building blocks of matter. Who do you think is the most important contributor to develop the current technological appliances in your daily life? Justify your reason.

Answer 1

According to me , Niels Bohr was the most important contributor in uncovering the fundamental building blocks of matter.He adapted Rutherford's nuclear structure to Max Planck's quantum theory and created his Bohr model of the atom. He advanced the theory of electrons travelling in orbits around the atom's nucleus, with the chemical properties of each element being largely determined by the number of electrons in the outer orbits of its atoms.He introduced the idea that an electron could drop from a higher-energy orbit to a lower one, in the process emitting a quantum of discrete energy. This became a basis for what is now known as the old quantum theory. His three papers, which later became famous as "the trilogy", were published in Philosophical Magazine in 1913. Many older physicists, like Thomson, Rayleigh and Hendrik Lorentz, did not like the trilogy, but the younger generation, including Rutherford, David Hilbert, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Max Born and Arnold Sommerfeld saw it as a breakthrough. The trilogy's acceptance was entirely due to its ability to explain phenomena which stymied other models, and to predict results that were subsequently verified by experiments.Today, the Bohr model of the atom has been superseded, but is still the best known model of the atom.