J.J. Thomson Talks
About the Size of the Electron

To listen to J.J. Thomson speaking on his discovery:

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"Could anything at first sight seem more impractical than a body which is so small that its mass is an insignificant fraction of the mass of an atom of hydrogen? --which itself is so small that a crowd of these atoms equal in number to the population of the whole world would be too small to have been detected by any means then known to science."


Recording made in 1934. From the soundtrack of the film, Atomic Physics
copyright © J. Arthur Rank Organization, Ltd., 1948.

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© 1997- American Institute of Physics