Abstract
THE Liversidge Research Lecture delivered before the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science in January by Sir D. Orme Masson dealt with “Crucial Advances in Chemical Theory during the last Half-Century”. The lecture gave a brief summary of the initiation of the theory of solution and electrolytic dissociation, the discovery of the inactive elements, X-rays, radioactivity, atomic numbers and the nuclear theory of the atom, isotopes, positive rays and a generalised formula for the structure of all atoms proposed by the lecturer in 1921. The latter states that, if p is a proton, e an electron, N the atomic number and A the true integral mass of the atom, with n (necessarily integral) equal to the difference A - 2N, then every neutral atom may be represented by the formula [(pze)N (pe)n]eN, in which the nucleus is enclosed in the square bracket and the external electronic system is outside it. In the case of hydrogen, n - 1. The groups pe and pze have since been discovered in the neutron and the heavy hydrogen nucleus, respectively.
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Fifty Years of Chemical Theory. Nature 135, 578 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135578c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135578c0