In 1700 BC, a king named Hammurabi’s found a metal and recorded it. 1300 hundred years later, Democritus, a philosopher added an atomic theory of Leucippus’s. He stated the impossibility of dividing atoms, being impenetrable, and have about the same density to its volume. Also, atoms are active throughout the human body and that is the cause for human movement. With his philosophy and the atomic theory, he gained and introduced more knowledge with one another. He believed space had innumerous atoms floating around which is the cause for earth. Since atoms are comparable and are the same from within, he said iron and water are the same, but unable conjoin due to the spherical figure of water and its liquid. 100 years later and into 300 BC, Aristotle was also a philosopher and he stated that there were four elements in the world: fire, water, earth, and air. From Democritus’s theory, “all matter was made up of tiny substances eternal in nature that cling together.” And with that, it contributed hugely towards the atomic theory.
Aristotle appended to the theories that different types of matter came so by the four elements and the disparities of weather that can make endless possibilities. Although Aristotle’s work influenced western culture, he thinned the advancements towards science. Early philosophers were also alchemists and participated towards the science theories and with Alchemy it limited six studies. The Philosopher’s Stone was a mentation of taking cheap metals like iron and copper, compounded, and heated to make gold, a very precious metal to help with a human’s spiritual form. Many abused the practice to get rich quick method, but other alchemists with a grave mentality set the basics and practices regarded to science.
The Elixir of Life, a thought of people who believed it existed and there was a few unpopular schemes of it, but in other myths it is idealized that it’s a drink or food that allotments immortality to the one who consumes it. The prominent fixes of the elixir are iron, copper, honey, mercury, and sulfur. Later on in modern society, they found out that many of the ingredient used by the alchemist’s to make the mix were eminently toxic. Alchemy’s road to explore and understand the world we live in needed apprehension of chemicals, it died in the Age of Reason of the 17th and 18th century and is now known as chemistry.
In 1667, Johann Joachim Becher would introduce the primary fact of the phlogiston theory. Alchemist’s had all 4 elements enlisted, but Becher phased out air and fire replaced them with the set of earth’s: terra fluida, terra lapidea, and terra pinguis. Terra pinguis was an element composed with flammable properties. The theory is believed to contain all flammable materials with phlogiston, a substance which is unnoticeable to the blind eye, but if burned you can witness its true form. It has been said that any substance burned in the air is precious to phlogiston.
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Daniel Rutherford in 1772 discovered nitrogen and he included it into the theory to further prove his findings. Many other experiments posed many problems and found out that magnesium would increase weight when burned even when believed to lose phlogiston. Mikhail Lomonosov repeated Boyle’s experiment and stated the phlogiston theory was false and he wrote this in his diary later: “Today I made an experiment in hermetic glass vessels in order to determine whether the mass of metals increases from the action of pure heat. The experiment demonstrated that the famous Robert Boyle was deluded, for without access of air from outside, the mass of the burnt metal remains the same.' The phlogiston theory was still in use when Lavoisier demonstrated a gas required weight and could be measured. This later lead a road for the caloric theory of combustion. In the 18th century, it was proven that metals when oxidized gained weight. When the term phlogiston was no longer used as the past definition, few alchemists referred as so, but meant the concept of hydrogen. John Dalton was the primary source of the atomic theory in which other philosophers contributing like, Galileo, Lavoisier, Boyle, and Newton. Dalton experimented with various gases and made the scheme of computation of atomic masses and pattern of atomic structure and reactivity.
In 1838, Michael Faraday discovered a unseen light in a glass tube filled with air and began with a cathode, meaning a negative electrode and the ending with a positive electrode or anode. William Crookes was a brit in the 1800’s and he and his team got rarefied tubes with a limit of pressure. These were called Crookes tubes. Protons were presented in 1815 by William Prout when he proposed that every atom are made of protyles or hydrogen atoms. Eugen Goldstein discovered canal rays in 1886 and they experimented to find out that a charge-to-mass scale of the hydrogen ion was the highest of every gas known to man, but it had the minimum size compared to all ionized gases. The atom’s nucleus was found by Ernest Rutherford in 1911 in his most distinguished experiment, the gold foil. He said that all the positively charged particles in the nucleus also goes for every negatively charged electrons in the area.
Two Germans, Herbert Becker and Walther Bothe had found the neutrons in 1930 when a form of radiation produced alpha particles exuded by polonium and the contributions to that effect were from boron, lithium, and beryllium. It was believed to be gamma radiation. J.J. Thompson was beginning to experiment with cathode ray tubes in the 1900’s and he owned sealed glass tubes with a very minimal amount of air inside it. An extreme voltage was enforced on one end of the tube with two electrodes with a result of a singular beam of particles to follow a negatively charged electrode to a positively charged electrode. They name of the tubes are named after the test, cathode ray tubes because of the original cathode that is caused due to the electrodes. Atoms have the capability to change into another element and this is called a nuclear reaction. This happens when the electrons “dropout” and no longer have the same number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus.
At times, a nuclear reaction can happen anytime without notice. There are three different types of nuclear reactions, every reaction shoots a photon-like object and are a side-effect of the elements changing numbers with the nucleus. The Alpha Decay reaction breaks into two parts, a pair of protons and the other piece related from the nucleus. Having contact with such a strong reactant can cause body damage and can change DNA. Radon can flow out of the ground and into basements. Releasing alpha particles and can get into people’s body tissues. This scheme of radon exposure can cause major lung cancer and it can be found anywhere in the world. From beta decay, one of the neutrons in the nucleus is capable to change into a proton, causing an extreme amount of atomic numbers in an element. The last type of radioactive material is gamma decay, during the process of gamma decay it releases radiation although the property doesn’t change with twelve nucleus’s, twelve protons, and twelve neutrons.
Gamma rays are extremely toxic with high energy and are one of the few dangerous sources of radiation. Photons can go through a living organism’s body tissue living tissues which can cause bad DNA change. However, gamma radiation also has basic uses for example: the element technetium emits relatively low-energy gamma decays that can be found using a special scanner. As previously informed, Enrico Fermi theorized the beta decay. One of his quotes “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon [the ‘Super’ hydrogen bomb] makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. For these reasons, we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public and the world what we think is wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon.”
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