Nagaoka, Hantaro

The atomic model in 1911. A Japanese scientist, Hantaro Nagaoka, proposed a similar, disk-shaped model with electrons orbiting a positively charged nucleus, in 1904. Rutherford notes in his 1911 paper that his results would be the same if Nagaoka s model were correct. 

A little-known paper of fundamental importance to modern atomic theory was published by Hantaro Nagaoka in 1904 [10]. Apart from oblique citation, it was soon buried and forgotten. With hindsight it deserved better than that. It contained the seminal ideas underlying the nuclear model of the atom, the standing-wave nature of orbital electrons and radiationless stationary states. It was so far ahead of contemporary thinking that later imitators either failed to appreciate its significance, or pretended to be unaware of it. 

J. J. Thomson proposes his plum pudding model of the atom, with electrons embedded in a nucleus of positive charges. Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka (1865-1950) proposes a Saturn model of the atom with a central nucleus having a ring of many electrons. 

P. Lenard, on the basis of the penetration of matter by cathode rays, proposed an atom made up of as many electric doublets of very small radius (less than 0 3 x cm.) as is required to produce its mass. This dynamide theory implies that a large part of an atom consists of empty space. Hantaro Nagaoka, professor of theoretical physics in Tokyo, suggested that an atom... 

In 1911, following some experiments by his students Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, Rutherford revived the notion of a planetary atom in which electrons were believed to circulate around a central nucleus. As discussed in chapter 7, Jean Perrin and, in a somewhat different version, Hantaro Nagaoka were the first to propose such atomic modek. But the nuclear atom had since been echpsed by the work ofThomson, which had suggested that the electrons were embedded in the main body of the atom. 

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