On Discovering Myself

THE ATOM SONG

Dalton, Thomson, Rutherford, and Bohr,
Schrödinger and Heisenberg and many many more,
Used their brains to venture in the realm of inner space
And found the world of the atom was a weird and wondrous place.

Dalton did experiments and said, "I think it's clear atoms are tiny indestructible spheres."

      Thomson worked with cathode rays. He said, "I disagree. A plum-pudding model makes much more sense to me."
A new chapter in atomic theory started to unfold when
Rutherford played around with atoms made of gold.
When a few of his alpha particles came bouncing back he hypothesized a nucleus had knocked them all off the track.

Dalton, Thomson, Rutherford, and Bohr,
Schrödinger and Heisenberg and many many more,
Used their brains to venture in the realm of inner space
And found the world of the atom was a weird and wondrous place.

Bohr saw spectral lines for hydrogen and said, "It seems to me electrons move in orbits with specific energy."

Heisenberg said, "Forget it. There's no way to know the orbit or a path where the electron's gonna go."

Schrödinger used lots and lots of fancy mathematics, made a model of the atom based on quantum mechanics. It has orbitals, and those are based on probability. The atom is a fuzzy blob of pure uncertainty.

Dalton, Thomson, Rutherford, and Bohr,
Schrödinger and Heisenberg and many many more,
Used their brains to venture in the realm of inner space
And found the world of the atom was a weird and wondrous place.