Aggregation and Flow of Solids

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Twenty years ago the electron theory was in its infancy, and we were almost entirely ignorant of the structure of the atom. No attempt had been made at that time to picture the atom, with its nucleus and electron rings, as an entity of definite form and structure. The atom was generally regarded as a minute particle separated from neighbouring atoms by distances which were enormously large in comparison with the dimensions of the atom itself.