Download Chemistry “Atom: Clash of the Titans” Video WS

Chemistry
“Atom: Clash of the Titans” Video WS
I. Based on the information in “Atom: Clash of the Titans”, please answer the following
questions:
1. Why was the theory of the atom so controversial back in the early 1900’s?
2. Why did the use of steam during the industrial revolution lead to an interest in understanding
the atom?
3. Einstein wrote an important paper on Brown’s observation of pollen grains moving on the
surface of the water. What impact did this paper have on early atomic theory?
4. Why do you think the partnership of Rutherford, a practical experimentalist, and Bohr, a
theoretical mathematician, was so successful in advancing the modern model of the atom?
5. What were three scientific discoveries during the turn of the century that turned science on its
head?
6. How did the gold foil experiment work? What radical suggestion to modify the experiment did
Rutherford make?
7. What impact did the discovery of the nucleus by Rutherford’s team have on the atomic model
and science in general?
8. Why was it so important that the scientists investigating the atom be young and unattached to
existing scientific thinking?
9. What connection did Bohr discover between atoms and light?
10. Why did Einstein hate Bohr’s ideas - quantum mechanics, electrons jumping and releasing
light -about the atom?
11. Why did Louis de Broglie and the “old school” scientists think radio waves could be used to
explain the atom?
12. Why were young scientists attracted to working with Bohr on quantum mechanics?
13. Why was the introduction of the Pauli exclusion principle so important to understanding the
great variety of matter and atoms in the universe?
14. Why did the traditionalists like Schrödinger’s wave equation so much?
15. Why did Heisenberg decide to abandon any attempts to draw a picture of the atom? What
did he use to describe the atom instead?
16. Why did Heisenberg want to destroy Schrödinger’s wave equation? What happened when
he tried to call out Schrödinger in public?
17. Almost the entire scientific community had turned on Bohr and Heisenberg, saying that their
“matrix mechanics” model of the atom was wrong. Why did they refuse to give up their ideas
and admit they were wrong?
18. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says that not only are there properties of the atom that we
don’t know, but it has properties that we CANNOT know. Also, if we aren’t looking at an atom, it
behaves like a wave, but if we look at it, it behaves like a particle. What do you think of this
idea?
19a.) How does it make you feel to know that everything in the universe is made of atoms, yet
we can never know what the atom is?
b.)Why was the Sorvay Conference in 1927 so important to the modern model of the atom,
known as the “Copenhagen interpretation”?
20. How is the “clash of the titans” over the atom related to Kuhn’s description of scientific
revolutions?