The Atom

Thomas Edison ran into a problem when he was attempting to create the light bulb. He was using a carbon filament and was vexed by the fact that the carbon was coating the bulb. He decided that the electricity was not only flowing though the filament, it was flowing through the evacuated bulb. He made a bulb with a third electrode in an attempt to divert the flow and stop the blackening. He found that electricity did flow to this third filament but it didn’t stop the blackening, so he abandoned the effort, patenting the new bulb in the process.
In the light bulb, electricity flows through a filament. The filament, according to science, produces resistance to the flow of electricity and heats up, producing light. In short, light isn’t made up of the electricity that produces it. The loss of electricity is due to resistance, not to it being converted to light. If the filament in the bulb is separated, the filament with the incoming flow of electrons is called a cathode because it produces a stream of what are now known to be electrons. The cathode ray tube is the basis of television.
If, instead of evacuating the bulb entirely, a small amount of gas is left inside it, Edison’s effect can actually be seen as the gas becomes a conductor for the electrons with paths of electrons being emitted by the cathode lighting up. J. J. Thomson was the first to experiment with these mysterious rays called cathode rays that the cathode produced in gas. (Edison’s effect is grudgingly acknowledged as the basis of the diode, the old electronic tubes that were replaced by transistors, but not at all for the cathode ray tube that basically operates on the effect.)
Thomson was the first to demonstrate that cathode rays could be deflected by an electric field and were therefore negatively charged particles. So we have electricity going into a modified light bulb and producing flows of electrons. Why does science insist that the filament of the light bulb is not giving off electrons, but something else? As we get into the topic of the structure of light latter in the book, we’ll see that light is a structured from of the elementary particle described in the last chapter, and that elementary particle is the electron operating in the light bulb. It just seems to me that someone, somewhere, once it was determined that a light bulb could be modified in a way that simply separated its filament and produced flows of electrons, newly named by Thomson, would have wondered whether light was made up of electrons, but no, science thinks in compartmentalized structures that excludes thought. Besides, light is not deflected by an electric current (or at least by the electric currents of the day).
At the same time all of this was going on, people were discovering and experimenting with radioactive matter, matter that decayed and in the process gave off bits of itself. One of the bits was called an alpha particle, and alpha particles were what Rutherford, the constructor of our vision of the atom, enjoyed experimenting with. He noticed that when the alpha particles were directed at gold foil, some of them were deflected. Up until this point, everyone pictured the atom as a small, round ball. However, when Rutherford found a percentage of his alpha particles deflected by the foil, he reasoned that they were bouncing off something. As most of the atoms were passing through the foil with only minor deflection, he reasoned that the material was made up of atoms and those atoms were something other than little round balls.
Rutherford’s experiments with radiation had already identified an additional particle, the beta particle that he later determined to be an electron, so he already had Thomson’s electron in mind when he set about analyzing the nature of the structure of matter the alpha rays were encountering. He started to visualize a nucleus with shells of electrons orbiting it. Dimitri Mendeleev had long before put together the periodic table of elements, arranging them by weight. Rutherford accounted for weight, what is called mass today, by creating the neutron. To keep the electrons in orbit around the nucleus, he created the proton.
This model had two major defects as pointed out in the last chapter. There was no explanation for the electrons motion and protons, being positive, were supposed to follow the likes repel rule, and therefore, couldn’t stay together in the nucleus. Science solved the latter problem by creating a strong force to hold the protons together, but has totally ignored the source of the motion of the orbiting electrons.
(To be continued)