Unit 10 Blog

1) Planck's Hypothesis says energy is released or absorbed in small packets, called photons. This theory helped Bohr create his model of the atom because there must be specific energy levels and specific paths for the electrons to travel on, due to these photons. Personally, this is the hardest concept to understand all unit because the photons could be seen as energy and particles at the same time.

2) The Plum Pudding Model included a wispy, positively charged nucleus with mobile electrons. However, this couldn’t be right because in the Gold Foil Experiment when the small positively charged particles were shot at the piece of gold foil, they usually went straight through although sometimes went slightly off course and rarely straight back to where they came from.
Rutherford’s model included the atom being made up of mostly space with a very small, positively charged nucleus and still including the electrons.

Using Planck’s hypothesis, Bohr created his new model that still had a small, positively charged nucleus, however this time he included electrons that had specific paths and energy levels.

His model was discarded because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that stated it is impossible to know the position and speed of an object at the same time.

The Quantum Model is very similar to our modern day model, with a small, positively charged nucleus, as well as electrons that move around the nucleus in energy-specific orbitals (a region of space with a high probability of finding an electron). The only change made to this model was when protons and neutrons were discovered. They are both subatomic particles that make up the nucleus with a mass of about 1 amu, with the neutrons having no charge and the protons having a charge of +1.

I think it is cool how we made it from the Plum Pudding Model to the modern day model because they are so different, but there was only one small change made each time. It was a long process, but so are a lot of other science discoveries.

3) All of these examples of spectroscopy were caused by electrons getting excited after gaining energy, then releasing this energy in the form of light. Not all the colors are shown because each element has a different number of electrons at different energy levels, which represents different colors and frequencies. Before this unit, I knew that light was made up of waves, however I didn’t know that the electrons in the atom was actually what caused this light and colors.