J. J. Thomson and the Bohr atom
DOI: 10.1063/1.3037496
In 1911 Niels Bohr went to Cambridge, hoping to talk physics with J. J. Thomson; the discoverer of the electron was friendly but uninterested. Two years later Bohr published his epochal three‐part paper on the constitution of atoms and molecules, which challenged the program and goal of the Cambridge school. Bohr’s new views soon won out; Thomson’s quaint atomic models were declared worthless—old lumber fit only, as Ernest Rutherford put it, “for a museum of scientific curiosities.” For his part Thomson rejected the advances made by Bohr as meretricious superficialities obtained without, or at the price of, an understanding of the mechanism of atoms.
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John L. Heilbron, University of California, Berkeley.
