How did Chadwick and Fermis work change our understanding of the atom?
I am hoping that a historian will visit this site and help out with this side of things. Until he does, here is some inexpert help from a physicist who is not a historian. Chadwick (see links below) is credited with discovering the neutron. Without neutrons, hydrogen would be the only stable element, which would simplify chemistry considerably, but simultaneously eliminate chemists. The neutron is not only important for holding the nucleus together, but also as a projectile for smashing into the nucleus (it is not deflected by electrostatic forces). It can be used as a probe of the nucleus. Neutron bombardment is important in chain reactions. See Chadwick and Fermi courtesy of the Nobel foundation. Fermi and Dirac devised the statistics to describe particles (like the electron) that are subject to Pauli’s exclusion principle: they cannot have the same quantum numbers. Such particles are called fermions (cf bosons). In the atom, these statistics explain the distribution of electrons amo
I am hoping that a historian will visit this site and help out with this side of things. Until he does, here is some inexpert help from a physicist who is not a historian. Chadwick (see links below) is credited with discovering the neutron. Without neutrons, hydrogen would be the only stable element, which would simplify chemistry considerably, but simultaneously eliminate chemists. The neutron is not only important for holding the nucleus together, but also as a projectile for smashing into the nucleus (it is not deflected by electrostatic forces). It can be used as a probe of the nucleus. Neutron bombardment is important in chain reactions. See Chadwick and Fermi courtesy of the Nobel foundation. Fermi and Dirac devised the statistics to describe particles (like the electron) that are subject to Pauli’s exclusion principle: they cannot have the same quantum numbers. Such particles are called fermions (cf bosons). In the atom, these statistics explain the distribution of electrons amo
