A theory of the structure and behavior of atoms has taken more than two millenia to evolve, from the

abstract musings of ancient Greek philosophers to the high-tech experiments of modern scientists.
However, prior to the scientific revolution and the development of the scientific method starting in the 16th
century, ideas about the atom were mainly speculative. It wasn't until the very end of the 19th century that
technology became advanced enough to allow scientists a glimpse of the atom's constituent parts: the
electron, nucleus, proton, and neutron.
The idea that all matter is made up of tiny, indivisible particles, or atoms, is believed to have originated
with the Greek philosopher Leucippus of Miletus and his student Democritus of Abdera in the 5th century
B.C. (The wordatom comes from the Greek word atomos, which means indivisible.) These thinkers held
that, in addition to being too small to be seen, unchangeable, and indestructible, atoms were also
completely solid, with no internal structure, and came in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes, which
accounted for the different kinds of matter. Color, taste, and other intangible qualities were also thought to
be composed of atoms.
While the idea of the atom was supported by some later Greek philosophers, it was fiercely attacked by
others, including Aristotle, who argued against the existence of such particles. During the Middle Ages in
Europe, Roman Catholic theologians were heavily influenced by Aristotle's ideas, and so atomic
philosophy was largely dismissed for centuries. However, the Greeks' conception of the atom survived,
both in Aristotle's works (his arguments against) and in another classical work by the Roman
author Lucretius, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), which was rediscovered in Europe at the
start of the Renaissance.
Modern atomic theory is generally said to begin with John Dalton, an English chemist and meteorologist
who in 1808 published a book on the atmosphere and the behavior of gases that was entitled A New
System of Chemical Philosophy. Dalton's theory of atoms rested on four basic ideas: chemical elements
were composed of atoms; the atoms of an element were identical in weight; the atoms of different
elements had different weights; and atoms combined only in small whole-number ratios, such as 1:1, 1:2,
2:1, 2:3, to form compounds.
Dalton's work was mainly about the chemistry of atomshow they combined to form new compounds
rather than the physical, internal structure of atoms, although he never denied the possibility of atoms'
having a substructure. Actually, what Thomson discovered was that cathode rays were streams of
negatively charged particles with a mass about 1,000 times smaller than a hydrogen atom. G. J. Stoney
had proposed that electricity was made of negative particles called electrons, and scientists had
adopted the word to refer to anything with an electric charge. model did not survive unchallenged for
long. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford's experiments with alpha rays led him to describe the atom as a small,
heavy nucleus with electrons in orbit around it.
In 1913, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had studied under both Thomson and Rutherford, further
refined the nuclear model by proposing that electrons moved only in restricted, successive orbital shells
and that the outer, higher-energy orbits determined the chemical properties of the different elements.
Since Thomson's discovery of the electron in 1897, scientists had realized that an atom must contain a
positive charge to counterbalance the electrons' negative charge. In 1919, as a byproduct of his
experiments on the splitting of atomic nuclei, Rutherford discovered the proton, which constitutes the
nucleus of a hydrogen atom. A proton carries a single positive electrical charge, and every atomic nucleus
contains one or more protons. Rutherford proposed the existence of a neutral subatomic particle,
the neutron, in 1920, the actual discovery was made by English physicist James Chadwick, a former
student of Rutherford, in 1932.