Words matter. These are the best Johannes Stark Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The discovery of various phenomena has led to a recognition of the fact that the chemical atom is an individual which again is itself made up of several units into a selfcontained whole.
Thus at the beginning of 1906 it seemed to be established that the emitters of the spectral series of chemical elements are their positive atomic ions.
With this in mind, for some twenty years I have set myself as my particular task the experimental investigation of the connexion between change in the structure and change in the spectra of chemical atoms.
By recognizing that the chemical atom is composed of single separable electric quanta, humanity has taken a great step forward in the investigation of the natural world.
Along a series of lines running from longer to shorter wavelengths the effect of the electric field becomes greater as the serial numbers increase – that is, as the wavelength decreases.
Moreover, the abundance of chemical compounds and their importance in daily life hindered the chemist from investigating the question, in what does the individuality of the atoms of different elements consist.
By allowing the positive ions to pass through an electric field and thus giving them a certain velocity, it is possible to distinguish them from the neutral, stationary atoms.
At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion.
For under certain conditions the chemical atoms emit light waves of a specific length or oscillation frequency – their familiar characteristic spectra – and these can come in the form of electromagnetic waves only from accelerated electric quanta.
The removal of an electron from the surface of an atom – that is, the ionization of the atom – means a fundamental structural change in its surface layer.
The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.
The most common and most important result of them is that the nature and size of the effect on corresponding series of different elements are largely an expression of the peculiarity of their atomic structure – or, at least, of the structure of the surface.
The movement of the emitters of the spectral lines may be deduced on the basis of the Doppler principle.
