The Spanish Armada was an enormous 130-ship naval fleet dispatched by Spain in 1588 as part of a planned invasion of England.

Universal mechanism They held that the universe is reducible to completely mechanical principles—that is, the motion and collision of matter. Descartes argued that one cannot explain the conscious mind in terms of the spatial dynamics of mechanistic bits of matter cannoning off each other.

All three terms refer to the scientific paradigm formulated by René Descartes in the seventeenth century (see Section 1.1. 3), in which the material universe is seen as a machine and nothing but a machine.

Descartes and the mechanical philosophy Descartes was also a mechanist. A substance dualist, he argued that reality is composed of two radically different types of substance: extended matter, on the one hand, and immaterial mind, on the other.

Mechanistic model. -Locke’s view. -Idea that people are like machines that react to environmental input. -Ex. To explain why some college students over drink a mechanistic theorist would look at environmental influences such as friends drinking and advertising.

René Descartes devised a Theory of Vortices which postulated that the space was entirely filled with matter in various states, whirling about the sun! Bodies once in motion, Descartes argued, remain in motion in a straight line unless and until they are deflected from this line by the impact of another body.

Descartes provides a ready example of a mechanical philosopher who was not an atomist insofar as he rejected the void and held that particles of matter could be broken down into smaller particles.

Democritus, a philosopher in ancient Greece, began the search for a description of matter. He named the smallest piece of matter “atomos,” meaning “not to be cut.” To Democritus, atoms were small, hard particles that were all made of the same material, but were formed into different shapes and sizes.

Aristotle considered the existence of a void, which was required by atomic theories, to violate physical principles. Aristotle has often been criticized for rejecting atomism, but in ancient Greece the atomic theories of Democritus remained “pure speculations, incapable of being put to any experimental test.”

Democritus (Greek: Δημόκριτος) was an ancient Greek philosopher. He was born in Thrace, Greece, circa 460 BC. He was a rich citizen of Abdera, in Thrace, and a student of Leucippus, another Greek philosopher.

Although a schoolteacher, a meteorologist, and an expert on color blindness, John Dalton is best known for his pioneering theory of atomism. He also developed methods to calculate atomic weights and structures and formulated the law of partial pressures.

Dalton’s atomic theory was the first complete attempt to describe all matter in terms of atoms and their properties. Dalton based his theory on the law of conservation of mass and the law of constant composition. The first part of his theory states that all matter is made of atoms, which are indivisible.

Drawbacks of Dalton’s Atomic Theory The indivisibility of an atom was proved wrong: an atom can be further subdivided into protons, neutrons and electrons. However an atom is the smallest particle that takes part in chemical reactions. According to Dalton, the atoms of same element are similar in all respects.

Joseph John Thomson

He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1906, “in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases.” He was knighted in 1908 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1912.

Quarks

Thomson, in full Sir Joseph John Thomson, (born December 18, 1856, Cheetham Hill, near Manchester, England—died August 30, 1940, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), English physicist who helped revolutionize the knowledge of atomic structure by his discovery of the electron (1897).

Cambridge, United Kingdom

In 1890, he married Rose Elisabeth, daughter of Sir George E. Paget, K.C.B. They had one son, now Sir George Paget Thomson, Emeritus Professor of Physics at London University, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937, and one daughter.

30 August 1940

In 1897, J.J. Thomson discovered the electron by experimenting with a Crookes, or cathode ray, tube. Thomson realized that the accepted model of an atom did not account for negatively or positively charged particles. Therefore, he proposed a model of the atom which he likened to plum pudding.

83 years (1856–1940)

Thomson’s experiments with cathode ray tubes showed that all atoms contain tiny negatively charged subatomic particles or electrons. Thomson proposed the plum pudding model of the atom, which had negatively-charged electrons embedded within a positively-charged “soup.”