What was thomsons plum pudding model

Following the discovery of the electron, J. Plum pudding is an English dessert similar to a blueberry muffin. The positive matter was thought to be jelly- like or a thick soup. The electrons were somewhat mobile. As they got closer to the outer portion of the atom, the positive charge in the region was greater than the neighboring negative charges and the electron would be pulled back more toward the center region of the atom.

However, this model of the atom soon gave way to a new model developed by New Zealander Ernest Rutherford about five years later. Thomson did still receive many honors during his lifetime, including being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in and a knighthood in Use the link below to answer the following questions:. Skip to main content. Atomic Structure. Search for:. What is this model airplane composed of? Figure 1. Summary A model gives an idea of what something looks like, but is not the real thing.

In this model, what is the dough? What was the major purpose of the plum pudding model? This effectively disproved the notion that the hydrogen atom was the smallest unit of matter, and Thompson went further to suggest that atoms were divisible.

To explain the overall charge of the atom, which consisted of both positive and negative charges, Thompson proposed a model whereby the negatively charged corpuscles were distributed in a uniform sea of positive charge. And from this, the Plum Pudding Model was born, so named because it closely resembled the English desert that consists of plum cake and raisins. Unfortunately, subsequent experiments revealed a number of scientific problems with the model. Five years later, the model would be disproved by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, who conducted a series of experiments using alpha particles and gold foil.

However, they noted instead that while most shot straight through, some of them were scattered in various directions, with some going back in the direction of the source. Since alpha particles are just helium nuclei which are positively charged this implied that the positive charge in the atom was not widely dispersed, but concentrated in a tiny volume.

In addition, the fact that those particles that were not deflected passed through unimpeded meant that these positive spaces were separated by vast gulfs of empty space. Instead, he proposed a model where the atom consisted of mostly empty space, with all its positive charge concentrated in its center in a very tiny volume, that was surrounded by a cloud of electrons.

This came to be known as the Rutherford Model of the atom. While Van den Broek suggested that the atomic number of an element is very similar to its nuclear charge, the latter proposed a Solar-System-like model of the atom, where a nucleus contains the atomic number of positive charge and is surrounded by an equal number of electrons in orbital shells aka. We have written many interesting articles on the subject of atomic theory here at Universe Today.

Skip to content. Lateral view of a sort of a Crookes tube with a standing cross. Mayer: Floating magnets. Mayer: On the morphological laws of the configurations formed by magnets floating vertically and subjected to the attraction of a superposed magnet. Philosophical Magazine 5th series 17 , 98— Google Scholar. Joseph John Thomson: On the structure of the atom. Philosophical Magazine 6th series 7 , — Google Scholar.

Secondary Literature 6. John Heilbron: J. Thomson and the Bohr atom. Armin Hermann ed. Physik, issue 10 Google Scholar.