yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Thomson's Plum Pudding Model of the Atom


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

So the word atom means uncuttable, so the Greeks were thinking of it as a tiny hard sphere.

Phil: That's right.

Derek: And even up until the eighteen hundreds, that was the idea of an atom, the smallest piece of matter, a tiny hard sphere. But then we find out that that's not quite right, not quite. There were experiments in the eighteen hundreds that discovered the electron. JJ Thomson's experiments really worked out the electron was smaller than an atom, about 1000 times smaller than a hydrogen atom, and it was in all atoms.

Phil: That's right, not just hydrogen.

Derek: Whatever material he did his experiments on, he found there were electrons in them. There are electrons in all atoms. So I guess when you find something smaller than an atom, you need to propose a new model for the atom that actually has something smaller in it, some substructure.

Phil: That's right. So something like this. This is our model of the atom.

Phil: This is our model of the atom - in his day, it was known as the plum pudding model, but uh... here we have cherry tart.

Phil: Cherry tart, ok. So the idea being that we have an overall atom, usually pictured as spherical rather than 2D, but uh... but imbedded within it – and this is the important part – there are negative electrons represented by cherries, and they can come out. The overall atom is neutral, so that means that pudding part must be positive.

Derek: Now how would you get one of these electrons out of our pudding here? So electrons are negatively charged, so we'll need to put something very positive, which attracts electrons – a high voltage.

Derek: And that would have the effect of, say, like plucking a cherry out of the pudding.

Phil: That's pretty much it, yeah. You could do it kind of like that, so we're simulating what it would be like to put a positive charge up here.

Phil: That's right, that's right.

Derek: Pulling the electrons out of the atom, that's quite delicious.

Phil: Yeah! Well, that is the most delicious model of the atom, I've gotta say. So shall we uh, split the atom? Why don't you go ahead?

Phil: You want me to do it?

Derek: Yes! Who knows what could happen; a whole bunch of energy could be released.

Phil: Yeah, one, two, three...

More Articles

View All
Why AI Hasn’t Blown Our Minds…Yet
Hypothetically, if AI is a bust in a bunch of different ways but it works extremely well fixing customer service, that’s still massive. It’s going to change our world; massive impact. Hello, this is Dalton plus Michael and today we’re going to talk about…
How Much Income You Need To Save (By EVERY Age)
What’s up, me guys? It’s Graham here. So, it’s recently said that nearly a third of Americans would go broke in less than a week if they lost their job. To make matters worse, 55% of Americans have less than $1,000 saved. 70% admit to bad spending habits,…
Robinhood Just Got Cancelled - Again
What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here. So historically, they say that on average September is the worst month for the stock market, dating all the way back to 1950. Now whether or not that comes true for this month is yet to be seen, but I have to say the…
Someone Dead Ruined My Life… Again.
Tada! It’s a video about Tiffany! I hope you like it. Psst. Hey, hey. Would you like to know more? Okay, great. So listen, I need to tell you about this poem. Come with me behind the scenes where I’ve been working on this for… I don’t even know how long. …
Protecting the Sun Bears of Borneo | National Geographic
People in many cultures still heat Sanders as sneak, and then thunder is believed to have certain body parts that are believed to have medicine and values. For example, gallbladder Sanders play very important roles in the forest ecosystems. They play a ro…
GameStop's Final Blow to the Short Sellers
So as we’ve been following over the last couple of months, Gamestop shares have literally been flying all over the place in the aftermath of the Reddit-fueled short squeeze that happened at the end of January. Over the past couple of months, myself and Ha…