Hgj moseley biography

Contribution to our understanding

Previous to Moseley and his law, atomic numbers had been thought of as a semi-arbitrary ordering number, vaguely increasing with atomic weight but not strictly defined by it. Moseley's discovery showed that atomic numbers were not arbitrary but have a physical basis.

He redefined the idea of atomic numbers from its previous status as an around-about approximate numerical tag to help sorting, i.e. in the periodic table, into a real and objective whole-number quantity which was experimentally directly measurable. Furthermore, as noted by Bohr, Moseley's law provided a reasonably complete experimental set of data supporting the (at that time new from 1911) Ernest Rutherford/Antonius Van den Broek concept of the atom, in which atomic number is understood as representing physically exactly the number of positive charges (protons) in a central atomic nucleus (Moseley mentions these two scientists in his paper, but does not actually mention Bohr Henry Moseley: rayos X, tabla periódica y guerra - ResearchGate BURA