Why did j. j. thomson experiment with cathode ray tubes?

To find out the nature of cathode rays.

Explanation:

Cathode rays tubes were born from experiment to study the conductivity of electricity in gases. The arrange of the experiment was a tube of glass with some gas inside, metallic plates in the both ends of the tube, a source of voltage and an amperemeter, as it is shown in the figure attached.

A differential potential was applied between the two plates. The one connected to the negative pole has the name “cathode” and the one connected to positive pole has the name of “anode”. Measurement of  the electricity that passed through the tube between the cathode and the anode was made with different samples of gasses, then it was made with the tube in vacuum, giving as surprising result a lecture of current marked in the amperemeter (even without a material medium to travel the electric current from the cathode to the anode).

Later, variations of the experiment made for the physicist William Crookes showed at that time a “radiation” coming from the cathode (which receive the name of cathode rays). He showed that under the presence of a magnetic field the cathode rays were deviated. That gave the hypothesis that the cathode rays were made of electrical negative particles.

The particles of negative charge (electrons) were confirmed from the experiments of J.J Thomson in 1897 by the use of an electric field. With cathode of different materials, Thomson made the conclusion of all materials have this negative charge particle in their composition.

quantum mechanics or quantum physics is physics of very small objects (particles) and physical entities.

quantum physics has some parallels to our macro world and some pretty unique ideas which theoretically and mathematically proven to be true even though we will never be able to access them because of our size.

there are many types of particles: subatomic, elementary etc.

subatomic means they are smaller than atom, elementary means they are at the very basis of everything.

subatomic particles are for eg. protons, neutrons but not electrons.

elementary particles are categorised into 3 groups by what they do.

these 3 groups are quarks, leptons and bosons.

light for example is a particle more precisely a photon a part of leptons.

proton (subatomic particle) is made out of 2 up quarks and 1 down quark each of these has a fractional charge like . (i crazy)

most famous scientist who contributed to this physics are:

the topic itself us understand a lot and will probably be vastly used in the future (quantum computers, understanding the big bang,

we also must not forget quantum effects like:

and there is more. but probably too much for this answer to be consistent due to my average understanding of this topic.

hope this you understand quantum mechanics a little more. i'm not an expert in the topic (so don't be like wth if you are an expert) but i'm very interested in it.

anyways quantum physics is a very hard topic (harder than physics (perhaps)) therefore searching for every information there is about it and learning it is unfortunately impossible (you can only specialise into 1 - 3 things or more (perhaps

have fun and i wish you luck!

r3t40