John Dalton
“What is the world made of?”
Today, we answer: of atoms. The credit for this discovery is owed in part to John Dalton, who presented the first experimental evidence that elements and materials are composed of extremely small particles he called atoms.
Dalton was born on September 6, 1766, and became renowned for his pioneering work in physics and chemistry. He proposed a theory stating that all matter - solid, liquid, or gas - is made up of indivisible and indestructible building blocks known as atoms. He suggested that atoms of the same element are identical, while atoms of different elements vary in size, mass, and chemical properties. This was the first comprehensive attempt to describe all matter in terms of atoms and their characteristics.
Although advances in science and technology have shown that Dalton’s theory was not entirely accurate, it laid the foundation for our modern understanding of matter at the atomic and subatomic level.
