What is Matter?

In chemistry class we started learning about the history of matter. While learning this we also learned that in the late, late past it didn't matter if you were right it just mattered how many followers or people believing you had. So a lot of the early scientist where wrong. The first person we learned about was Aristotle.

His idea was that there was no such thing as empty space and matter can only be made of earth, fire, air, and water. We proved his idea wrong because while learning about gas particles we learned about how the flow freely through empty space. The second was Dalton all his ideas where based around the atom. They ranged from color, shape, size, and motion of the atom. A few of his ideas where right such as atoms are invisible and indestructible, atoms of the same element are the same size and color, and atoms of different elements are different, and when you combine elements they create a compound. When learning about Dalton we did an online computer assignment that showed all of the scientist experiments. He also thought that protons and neutrons and electrons where just scattered all over the place in and atom. 

The scientist that proved Dalton wrong was JJ Thomson. He used his cathode ray experiment to show the charge to mass ratio and that the mass an electron is less than the mass of the lightest element.

Next was Robert Millikon who discovered that an electron carries a negative charge and used Thomson’s ratio to calculate the mass of an actual electron. Rutherford discovered the atom is mostly empty space and the proton and neutrons are all in the nucleus, through an experiment.

Also protons and neutrons are bigger than an electron, making the nucleus the densest part of an atom.