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He experimented to see if the charge can be separated from
the rays by bending the rays with magnets.
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Once discovering he could not separate the two, he concluded
that the negative charge and the cathode rays are somehow connected.
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Charged particles normally curve while moving through an
electric field unless surrounded by a conductor. Thomson wondered if the
traces of gas left in the tube were being turned into a conductor by the
cathode rays.
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He extracted as much of the gas from a tube as he could and
learned that the cathode rays did bend in an electric field.
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From these two experiments he concluded that cathode rays
are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter.
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The objective of this experiment was to learn the basic
properties of the particles.
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He measured the extent to which the rays were bent by a magnetic
field and how much energy they carried using various tubes and different
gasses.
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He was then able to calculate the ratio of the mass of a
particle to its electric charge (m/e).
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The mass to charge ratio was calculated to be over one thousand
times smaller than the ration of a charged hydrogen atom.
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Thomson concluded from this that the matter in the cathode
rays were in a newly found state, one in which all matter is made of.
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