WHAT WE ARE MADE UP OF?
Getting started with the structure
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space everything else is opinion.- Democrits
We all live among a cluster of atoms that have occupied the empty space. From a distance, everything looks continuous, filled, and occupied. Take a door or the device from which you are reading this everything looks defined in its dimension and the space it occupies. But if I say it is not the truth what is your reaction?
At a scale far too small for us to truly comprehend, the matter is bumpy and discontinuous, it is made up of empty space scattered by countless tiny particles. For ages, this notion of thought is called Atomism. The modern definition of the atom is an intensive work of the past two hundred years work but its history dates back to 2500 years.
From the Democrits view, we have a formal idea of what the objects are made up of. The arrangement of the tiny particles called atoms with some define voids between them gives us a rough idea of what we are made up of. It is interesting to believe that the bone and the stars share the same type of tiny particles called Calcium atoms.
Exploring the Structure of the atom
NOTE: This is not the exact picture of an atom but to understand the concept we need to start with a simple explanation.
Now I am going to steal the imagination of Niels Bhor and mix my thoughts with it. Bhor proposed a model of the atom in his words it is more formal and a little confusing to grasp.
Everyone will know about our solar system so imagine that the solar system is scaled to a size that is not possible even for the powerful microscope to see it. Let's make some changes. The sun is now called the nucleus (which literally means " inner part of something") and the nucleus is composed of two different entities called neutrons (something which is neutral) and protons (which means first in greek) where the sun is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium gas. You may ask what shape we can assign to the. With some scientific reasoning, we can consider them as spherical solid balls.
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/edu_solar_system_large.png
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/dictionary/Solar_System.html
Let us come to the planets revolving around the sun. First, there are 8 planets, we don't want 8 now so we take only two of them. We know that their path around the sun is elliptical, let us choose it to be circular for simplicity. The planets are not similar in size and composition so let them be of similar size and made up of something that we don't know. At last scale it down to a small size i.e. if the size of the sun is the size of a basketball the planets are of the size of the smallest piece of mustard that you can find. Now nake the planets as electrons (electrons means electric).
So now we have an image of an atom that is composed of a nucleus and electrons. In general, these have some characteristic properties that can't be taken from them. The protons are always positive and they possess the property of positive charge (charge is a fundamental property like mass). The neutrons have no charge, you may think it has nothing then why does it exist? Well is it good reasoning but it is there for a purpose. The proton and neutron making up the nucleus as the sun is the heart of our solar system if any bad thing happens to it it will affect the whole system in a similar way nucleus is very important. Next are the electrons, these are the bad guys from the outside view but they are essential. Electrons are negative so they possess a negative charge.
In general neutrons and protons possess the same mass and the electrons are 1000 times lighter than neutrons and protons. In a stable atom, the number of neutrons, protons, and electrons are present in the same number. As electron and proton have the opposite charges the atom as a whole is neutral which mean from the outside it does not have any charge but in reality, there are only a few atoms in this configuration. As we can't see a real atom in its real state we really don't know its color so for the sake of imagination, we can assign them few colors. So as a whole an atom has very few particles and a huge void.
Now if you sum up the above image we have a Helium atom in front of us. In an idealized, frozen view an atom looks like this.
BY JOHN PAUL using blender
RED IS PROTON----BLUE IS NEUTRON---- AND YOU KNOW WHAT IS AN ELECTRON
Click the video and wait for few seconds
These electrons, protons, and neutrons are called fundamental particles.
Now tight your imagination we are going to look at how an atom would look really.
The real picture
Till now we have thought of electron as something continuous and defined in terms of geometry like a sphere. These are true but only in very extreme conditions which gives it a probability of 0.000000001 to actually see in the next 100000 years. what I mean is that this case is hypothetical but real.
So we have to again do some hard changes in our existing imagination. Very well the electrons are in specific orbits but those are discrete and not continuous i.e they lie within a specific region or boundary.
An electron inside an atom can revolve around our earth in 18 seconds which is only 1% less than the speed of light so the electron is a fast-moving object, for this reason, the electron's path in the specified orbitals can't be determined perfectly. So there is a probability of the electron to be any were in the specified rgion.
New illustration of an atom by J JOHN PAUL
RED IS PROTRON, BLUE IS NEUTRON, GREEN AREA IS THE ORBITAL WHERE THE ATOM CAN BE FOUND IN ANY PLACE.
Additional to the above-mentioned properties an electron possesses spin because it rotates by itself. Even neutron and proton have spin-like electrons but with different values. Therefore the fundamental properties have the following properties spin, charge, and mass, these three properties are used to differentiate the fundamental particles of a matter.
WE WILL SEE MORE ABOUT THE FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLES AND THE RULES THAT THE ATOM OBEYS IN THE UPCOMING SEGMENTS.
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Hope this article was useful and I hope you learnt something from it.
If you have any theories or questions regarding this you are free to express them in comments or you can chat with me in my Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/phy.sci/?hl=en.
For previous articles on previous series following link link
