物理学本科专业毕业论文-外文及其翻译.doc

Introduction
Although the Greek philosopher Democritus had postulated the existence of atoms in the first century BC and Dalton’s atomic theory of 1807 laid the basis for the existence of atoms before the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, at that time an influential school of German physicists led by Ernst Mach considered the atomic model to be merely a useful picture with no basis in reality.
THE EXISTENCE OF ATOMS
The situation was dramatically changed by an explosion of experimental investigation over the fifteen years between 1897 and 1912. in the 1870s, technical improvements in the construction of vacuum pumps had made possible the investigation of electrical phenomenon in evacuated tubes and the discovery of invisible rays which traveled between an electrically negative electrode (cathode) and an electrically positive electrode (anode) in such a tube.
These rays came to be known as cathode rays. At first there was considerable controversy over their nature, but a series of experiments carried out by . Thomson in 1897 demonstrated conclusively that the cathode rays consisted of a stream of negatively charged particles, presumably emitted by atoms in the cathode (Fig. ).
Thomson’s measurements of the deflection of the rays by electric and ic fields enabled the speed of the particles to be measured and also the ratio of the charge of a particle to its mass. By the turn of the century, the charge-mass radio of these particles, which came to be called electrons, could be measured to quite high precision.
However, to give absolute values of the charge and mass, experiments of a different type were required. The most essful were investigations where macroscopic particles such as oil droplets were charged in some way and their motion in electric fields observed. A relatively straightforward measurement of the mass of the oil droplets enabled the charge of the charge of the electron to be measured. The famous experiments carried out by Millikan be