Looking Inside The Atom

The internal structure of an atom revealed...

The atom is a weird and wonderful thing. One of the biggest lessons to take away from a study of science is that the world of the very small is extremely different from the world of the very big.

We are used to seeing objects being significantly extended in the three familiar dimensions of space: up/down, left/right and back/forth.

However on the microscopic scale, some of these concepts become a little blurred and confused, and the world of the atom is very confusing indeed.

The basic structure of an atom that is now known is that you have a tiny nucleus at the centre, that is composed of protons and neutrons bound tightly together.

Orbiting around these at fast speed are electrons, which are much smaller and lighter than the particles at the centre of the nucleus. The protons have an electric charge designated +1, the neutrons are neutral and the electrons have charge -1.

Now what is interesting is that the nucleus holds together, logic suggests that the nucleus should be very unstable and explode apart because of all the positive charged protons being so close together, just like two magnets repelling each other.

However, the nucleus holds together because of something called the strong nuclear force, a force that was discovered relatively recently and operates at tiny distances but is incredibly strong indeed, and overcomes the electrical repulsion between protons on the tiny, tiny scales we are talking about with regard the atom.

Another interesting point about the atom is that scientists have gradually added more and more particles and the atom, meaning unsplittable in Greek, is now known not to be basic at all - not only are there the constituents of the atom we've seen, but also the protons and neutrons in turn are made up of something called quarks (which themselves come in different types or 'flavours').

Also worthy of note is that electrons do not all have the same orbit, in fact there are what are called different energy levels, which can roughly be equated to different floors on a building, and there are rules as to how many electrons can be on one level and how they move from level to level (going down a level they lose energy, to go up they must gain it) and these are associated with absorbing or emitting a photon.

Yet another interesting point is that it turns out we can never know everything about an electron, it is fundamentally hidden to us by the world to know everything about an electron; its location, its speed and its spin. A measurement of its location will make its speed unknown to us, and vice versa. This is not just due to our lack of knowledge or technological abilities, according to the laws of quantum mechanics there is something called the Uncertainty Principle that makes this inherently unknown to us (unless quantum mechanics is wrong or more likely an extremely good approximation to some still more powerful underlying theory that in a way we don't know now tells us that the uncertainly principle is wrong and that there is a way).

A final very counter-intuitive fact about the atom is that it's virtually all empty space. This is very surprising because if you run into a brick wall, it definitely feels solid! However atoms are virtually all space, and in fact to give you an idea, if all the space inside the atoms of your body were removed, you would collapse down to something the size of a grain of sand!

Author: Dan

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Last Updated: Feb 1st 2008

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Can elements have more smaller particles than mesons or even less than that?

Science is finding more fundamental particles all the time, and so the standard model seems to get rather larger all the time, and with supersymmetry if it is true then a whole host of more particles will be found. Depending on theory, there could be extremely small entities called strings that are absolutely tiny even compared to subatomic particles that will never be possible to be seen directly as far as we understand.

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