JOHN DALTON British physicist and meteorologist, best known for his contributions to the atomic theory.

Dalton was born in Eaglesfield, Cumberland (now Cumbria), of Quaker parents. He was educated at the Quaker village school, where he was so successful that at the age of 12 he himself became a teacher. In 1781 he was appointed assistant at the Quaker school in Kendal and four years later became joint principal. There he came under the influence of the blind scientist John Gough, who taught him mathematics, as well as meteorology and botany. As Quakers generally avoided systems of natural philosophy, and preferred the observational sciences, this curriculum was fairly typical of their scientific interests. From 1787, Dalton kept a daily meteorological journal, which he maintained until the end of his life. This led to his first book, Meteorological Observations and Essays (1793), which contained ideas on evaporation to which his atomic theory can be traced. He argued that in a mixture of gases, each gas acted independently. In particular, the mixtures total pressure was equal to the sum of the pressures that each constituent would exert if it occupied the volume alone. This is now called Daltons law of partial pressures. However, this work produced no immediate reaction in the scientific world. In 1793, Dalton was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the Dissenting New College, Manchester, a position he held until 1799, when he set up his own academy. He was elected a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1794 and read many of his papers there. In the first of these he identified the phenomenon of colour blindness, an affliction that he and his brother shared.

In 1801 he elaborated his work on gases, which attracted considerable criticism since he was in effect saying that chemical affinity had no part to play in the behaviour of gases. That is, he argued that the atmosphere was a mechanical mixture of gases and that chemical reactions between the constituent gases played no part in its composition. To provide proof of his views, Dalton was led to conduct experiments on the solubility of gases in water, which showed that dissolved gases were mechanically mixed with the water rather than having a chemical affinity for it. However, it became clear by 1803 that this mechanical mixing was dependent on the weight of the individual particles of the gases, or atoms. By assuming that particles were spherical, and of the same size but different weights, Dalton was able to develop the idea of atomic weights and to provide formulae for various compounds. This in turn led to the supposition that each chemical element (itself a relatively new concept) had its own specific atom. Dalton published these ideas in his New System of Chemical Philosophy (18081842). Daltons ideas concerning the weights of elements that would combine with each other were valuable; they were widely taken up and secured his contemporary fame as a chemical philosopher. The French Acadmie des Sciences elected him as one of their eight foreign associates in 1830. However, his notion that matter was made up of hard, indivisible atoms was adopted only in a very limited way. Indeed, outright support from his contemporaries for the existence of such entities was rare. Much more common were criticisms from such thinkers as Humphry Davy, William Whewell, and Michael Faraday. The reluctance to accept atomism was partly to do with its past history, when it had been associated with materialism, and thus with atheism. However, there was also a sound scientific argument against atomism, expressed most cogently by

Faraday, who said that we know of matter only through the forces it exerts, which tells us nothing about its internal structure. This view was to predominate, and it was not until the late 19th century that atomism became generally accepted. There is an irony in this acceptance, since in 1897 J. J. Thomson announced the existence of the first subatomic particle (later called the electron), and thus divided Daltons supposedly indivisible atoms. After 1810 Daltons chemical work concentrated on continuing to determine atomic weights, using a wide variety of chemical compounds. He published his results in later editions of his New System. He also undertook numerous peripatetic lectures round Britain and some scientific administration. He had been Secretary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society since 1800; in 1808 he became Vice-President and in 1817 President, a post that he held until his death. He played an active role in founding the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831 and was prominent in its Chemistry Section. At the 1832 meeting of the Association in Oxford, the university conferred the degree of DCL on him. Owing to his colour blindness, Dalton did not realize that he was wearing a bright scarlet robe at the degree ceremony. This accidental ostentatious display of colour by a Quaker attracted much amused comment at the time. Following a stroke in 1837, Dalton became an invalid and was unable to travel as much as he had formerly. When the British Association held its annual meeting in Manchester in 1842, Dalton was unable to serve as President. He died in Manchester on July 27, 1844, and was accorded a civic funeral. Later his statue was erected in the entrance to Manchesters City Hall. BOHR, NIELS HENRIK DAVID A Danish physicist and Nobel laureate, who made basic contributions to nuclear physics and the understanding of atomic structure.

Bohr was born in Copenhagen on October 7, 1885, the son of a physiology professor, and was educated at the University of Copenhagen, where he earned his doctorate in 1911. That same year he went to the University of Cambridge in England to study nuclear physics under J. J. Thomson, but he soon moved to the University of Manchester to work with Ernest Rutherford. Bohr's theory of atomic structure, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922, was published in papers between 1913 and 1915. His work drew on Rutherford's nuclear model of the atom, in which the atom is seen as a compact nucleus surrounded by a swarm of much lighter electrons. Bohr's atomic model made use of quantum theory and the Planck constant (the ratio between quantum size and radiation frequency). The model posits that an atom emits electromagnetic radiation only when an electron in the atom jumps from one quantum level to another. This model contributed enormously to future developments of theoretical atomic physics. In 1916 Bohr returned to the University of Copenhagen as a Professor of Physics, and in 1920 he was made Director of the university's newly formed Institute for Theoretical Physics. There Bohr developed a theory relating quantum numbers to large systems that follow classical laws, and made other major contributions to theoretical physics. His work helped lead to the concept that electrons exist in

A Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr was known not only for his own theoretical work but also as a mentor to younger physicists who themselves made important contributions to physical theory. As the director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, Bohr gathered together some of the finest minds in the physics community, such as Werner Heisenberg and George Gamow.

shells and that the electrons in the outermost shell determine an atom's chemical properties. He also served as a visiting professor at many universities. In 1939, recognizing the significance of the fission experiments of the German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, Bohr convinced physicists at a scientific conference in the United States of the importance of those experiments. He later demonstrated that uranium-235 is the particular isotope of uranium that undergoes nuclear fission. Bohr then returned to Denmark, where he was forced to remain after the German occupation of the country in 1940. Eventually, however, he escaped to Sweden, in peril of his life and that of his family. From Sweden the Bohrs traveled to England and eventually to the United States, where Bohr joined in the effort to develop the first atomic bomb, working at Los Alamos, New Mexico, until the first bomb's detonation in 1945. He opposed complete secrecy of the project, however, and feared the consequences of this ominous new development. He desired international control. In 1945 Bohr returned to the University of Copenhagen, where he immediately began working to develop peaceful uses for atomic energy. He organized the first Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva, held in 1955, and two years later he received the first Atoms for Peace Award. Bohr died in Copenhagen on November 18, 1962. ERNEST RUTHERFORD A British physicist, who became a Nobel laureate for his pioneering work in nuclear physics and for his theory of the structure of the atom. Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871, in Nelson, New Zealand, and was educated at the University of New Zealand and the University of Cambridge. He was Professor of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, from 1898 to 1907 and at the University of Manchester in England during the following 12 years.

After 1919 he was Professor of Experimental Physics and director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and also held a professorship, after 1920, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. Rutherford was one of the first and most important researchers in nuclear physics. Soon after the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 by the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel, Rutherford identified the three main components of radiation and named them alpha, beta, and gamma rays. He also showed that alpha particles are helium nuclei. His study of radiation led to his formulation of a theory of atomic structure, which was the first to describe the atom as a dense nucleus, which electrons circle. In 1919 Rutherford conducted an important experiment in nuclear physics when he bombarded nitrogen gas with alpha particles and obtained atoms of an isotope of oxygen and protons. This transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen was the first artificially induced nuclear reaction. It inspired the intensive research of later scientists on other nuclear transformations and on the nature and properties of radiation. Rutherford and the British physicist Frederick Soddy developed the explanation of radioactivity that scientists accept today. The rutherford, a unit of radioactivity, was named in his honour. Rutherford was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1903 and served as president of that institution from 1925 to 1930. He was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, was knighted in 1914, and was made a baron in 1931. He died in London on October 19, 1937, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His writings include Radioactivity (1904); Radiations from Radioactive Substances (1930), which he wrote with the physicists Sir James Chadwick and Charles Drummond Ellis, and which has become a standard text; and The Newer Alchemy (1937).

Rutherford stated that an atom consists largely of empty space, with an electrically positive nucleus in the centre, orbited by electrically negative electrons. By bombarding nitrogen gas with alpha particles (nuclear particles emitted in radioactive processes), Rutherford engineered the transformation of an atom of nitrogen into both an atom of oxygen and an atom of hydrogen. This experiment was an early stimulus to the development of nuclear energy, energy released in huge quantities by nuclear disintegration.

SIR JAMES CHADWICK A British physicist and Nobel laureate, who is best known for his discovery in 1932 of one of the fundamental particles of matter, the neutron, a discovery that led directly to nuclear fission and the atomic bomb. He was born in Manchester and educated there at Victoria University. In 1909 he began working under the physicist Ernest Rutherford. At the end of World War I he went to the University of Cambridge with Rutherford, with whom he continued a fruitful collaboration until 1935. In that year Chadwick became professor at the University of Liverpool. From 1948 to 1958 he was Master, and from 1959 a Fellow, of Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. Chadwick was one of the first in Britain to stress the possibility of the development of an atomic bomb and was the chief scientist associated with the British atomic bomb effort. He spent much of his time from 1943 to 1945 in the United States, principally at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now the Los Alamos National Laboratory), New Mexico. A Fellow of the Royal Society, Chadwick received the 1935 Nobel Prize for Physics and was knighted in 1945.