Bill Bryson - The Mighty Atom

Bill Bryson - The Mighty Atom

The Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one statement it would be: 'All things are made of atoms'. Everything you can touch and see around you is made up of atoms, including the air.

Atoms combine together to form molecules. At sea level, an object the size of a sugar cube will contain 45 billion billion molecules. Half a million atoms lined up side by side could still hide behind a single human hair. This shows how tiny atoms and molecules are and that there are a lot of them.

Atoms are also fantastically durable. They are passed from stars, to people, to plants. It has been suggested that a billion of the atoms that form a part of you, once belonged to William Shakespeare. So in a way, we are all reincarnations. When we die our atoms will be disassembled and reused into something else eg. another person, water, or a leaf. It has also been estimated that atoms can survive as long as 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

In the 1800s scientists such as John Dalton theorized the construction of atoms and molecules but because they are so tiny, it as impossible to prove who's theories were correct. This was the case until Earnest Rutherford conducted a series of experiments at Cambridge University in 1910. Rutherford's experiments proved atoms have a dense nucleus made up of neutrons, protons (positive charge), with electrons (negative charge) orbiting the nucleus. The nucleus only occupies 1 millionth of a billionth of the atom's full volume and atoms are essentially made up of empty space. If you expanded an atom to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would only be the size of a fly in the middle of it, except the fly would be thousands of times heavier than the cathedral.

As all things are made up of atoms and atoms are almost completely empty space, you might wonder why you don't just fall through the floor when standing on it. This doesn't happen because the negative charge the electrons have, repels the negative charge from atoms that it comes in contact with. So while you think you are standing of the floor, you're actually levitating 1 atom above the floor.

Further research that happened after 1905 by Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein gave rise to a theory called Quantum mechanics which describes the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. These theories have been tested and proven to be correct although from our everyday experiences they sound crazy. The current experiments at C.E.R.N using the large Hadron Collider are continuing to explore atoms and the very small world.

- Ella Jackson