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How do scientists study the makeup of protons? Scientist study the makeup of protons by using different kinds of devices called a bubble chamber. Why have scientists developed scaled-up models to study the atom? Because scaled-up models are used to represent things that are too small to see.
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How do we know the makeup of an atom?

There is no simple answer to your questions. There is no “atomic microscope” which would allow one to look inside an atom and say, “Aha! There’s 7 blue protons, 6 green neutrons, and 7 red electrons.” The way the structure of the atom was devised was through a long series of experiments.

Each one was designed to look at a specific aspect of the atom. At one time the atom was thought to be a solid ball of positive charge with electrons embedded in it. Then in 1909, Ernest Rutherford did an experiment which demonstrated that that picture was wrong and that the positive charge was centered at the center of the atom and occupied a very small volume compared to the whole atom.

Before the neutron was discovered in 1932, the nucleus was thought to have both protons and electrons in it. The number of protons was chosen to get the correct atomic weight and the number of electrons was chosen to get the correct nuclear charge. It turned out that this model did not give predictions that agreed with experiment.

1. The discovery of the neutron lead to a revision of the model leading to the current one.
2. In the current model, the number of electrons in the atom is determined by gamma and x-ray spectroscopy.
3. The number of protons in the atom is chosen to balance the charge of the electrons in the atom.
4. The number of neutrons in the atom is chosen to give the correct atomic weight for the element in question.

Many additional experiments were performed to confirm the model as finally developed and so far the results obtained are as one would expect from the model. This agreement between the experimental results and the predictions based on the model is what is called proof.
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Why have scientist developed scaled up models to study atoms?

Scaled-up models help you visualize things too small to see. Scaled-down models help you see something too large to see all at once. Scientists use scaled-up models to represent atoms. Our models have changed as our understanding of atomic structure has grown.
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How do we know what the inside of an atom looks like?

Electron microscopes – To magnify things more, a new tool was developed. This came in 1931, with the invention of the electron microscope. Beams of electrons are focused on a sample. When they hit it, they are scattered, and this scattering is used to recreate an image.
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Why can’t scientists see inside an atom?

‘Impossible,’ physicists once said, when asked whether people ever could see atoms. Today, physicist Nuri Oncel would answer, ‘Very possible indeed’ – Nuri Oncel, associate professor of physics and astrophysics, gave a presentation titled “Have you ever seen an atom?” for the Nov.20 Faculty Lecture Series. Photo by Patrick C. Miller/UND Today. Can you see an atom? In his recent Faculty Lecture on that topic at the University of North Dakota, Nuri Oncel, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astrophysics, answered that question this way: No.

• Yes. And yes.
• No, you can’t see an atom the way we’re used to “seeing” things – that is, using our eyes’ ability to perceive light.
• An atom is simply too small to deflect visible light waves, which means it won’t show up under even the most powerful light-focusing microscopes, Oncel said.
• But Yes, you can see an atom, once you understand that we can examine surfaces with beams of electrons rather than light.

Scanning tunneling microscopes generate electron waves that can interact with atoms. The microscopes measure that interaction and turn those readings into images of the atoms, often in astonishing detail, Oncel said. And Yes, you can “see” atoms with a long-range view as well. Silicon is a crystal, and by cutting a cube of silicon at various angles, scientists can generate planes or planar surfaces that feature various patterns of atoms. Si(111) refers to one such plane. On the left of this slide from Prof. Oncel’s PowerPoint presentation is a schematic of the atomic structure of the surface of Si(111).

• On the right is a scanning tunneling microscope image of that surface, colorized to more clearly show the atomic structure.
• Image courtesy of Nuri Oncel/University of North Dakota.
• For the long-range view shows how seeing – and studying, experimenting with and manipulating – atoms in this way not only contributes to the sum of human knowledge, but also helps advance the extraordinary technologies that have revolutionized life on Earth.

Those technologies include the desktop, laptop or smartphone on which you’re reading this story. “Nature uses atoms to form molecules and structures,” Oncel said. “And the things that we are interested in, we want to make them by ourselves. We want to actually control atoms and put them in the correct places in order to make useful structures.

That’s our motivation for the whole thing.” Seeing atoms via electron microscopy is making possible ever smaller and faster computers, as well as astonishing new materials such as graphene. Isolated as recently as 2002, graphene is the first two-dimensional material ever discovered. It’s a latticework of carbon atoms that’s only a single atom thick and yet, in proportion to its thickness, is 100 times stronger than steel.

“I am an experimental physicist, and my goal is to find new materials that have novel physical and chemical properties,” Oncel said. Seeing atoms is helping Oncel and his colleagues do just that.
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How are protons made?

The Science – The building blocks of protons and neutrons—quarks—are distributed differently in free protons and neutrons versus inside nuclei, Nuclear physicists call this difference “the EMC effect.” Each proton is made of three quarks, with two called up quarks and one called a down quark.
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How do we know atoms exist if they are so tiny?

Transcript – Atoms are the fundamental building blocks of chemistry. Just like baked goods are made of a collection of different types of ingredients, matter itself, is made of a collection of different types of atoms. Scientists have discovered 118 kinds of atoms, which we call elements.

1. They’re laid out on a chart called the Periodic Table.
2. All things from the screen this video is displayed on, to the eyeballs with which you’re watching it, are made of atoms but a single atom is so small, it is impossible to see with the naked eye.
3. So there you have it.
4. A random voice from a video you found on the internet claims that everything is made of invisibly small atoms.

You may now blindly accept this as fact and happily move on with your day, right? No? Now you’re extra curious? You want to know for yourself exactly why it is that scientists think that atoms exist? To find out we must travel back in time to ancient Greece: Meet Democritus, the man that many historians credit for first clearly proposing the idea of an atom.

In his day It was thought by some that if you were to chop up a piece of matter, an apple for instance, you could just keep chopping forever and ever, there was no end to smallness. For reasons not fully agreed upon by historians, this concept did not sit well with Democritus. Instead he insisted that at some point you would reach particles so small and so indestructible they could not be divided any further.

He called them “Atomos” or atoms, which means “uncuttable”. Democritus didn’t actually have any evidence to back his claim and because of that, many people rejected his idea. After all, that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Let’s fast forward several hundred years and hop over to the Arabic world. You probably know that salt can be extracted from seawater by simply boiling it dry. People have been doing this forever but Alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan and those that followed his work, took the science extraction to a whole new level.

Through careful experimentation they developed complex processes of filtration, boiling, vapor collection and cooling. They found that crude starting materials could be divided into multiple incredibly pure substances. Pure meaning they appeared consistent all the way through unlike the complex mixtures of matter we often find in nature.

In the 1700s, a French husband and wife scientific duo (Marie-Anne Paulze and Antoine Lavoisier) studied and built upon the work of their Arabic predecessors. They found that certain pure substances could be broken down even further through chemical reactions. Water, for example, can be split into into two pure gases: hydrogen and oxygen.

No matter how hard they tried, however, they could not reduce oxygen or hydrogen into simpler gases. They concluded that the gases must be elements – foundational substances that cannot be created by mixing other chemicals together, and cannot be broken down any further.

With this concept in mind, scientists everywhere begin searching for and listing as many elements as they could, eventually discovering all 118 listed on the modern periodic table. Some, such as oxygen and hydrogen, are gases at room temperature. Others are solid, such as elemental carbon and gold. Other’s still are liquid at room temperature – mercury and bromine.

It was also found that under the right conditions (pressure and temperature) certain elements will react with each other upon mixing, to form new substances with new properties. These are called compounds. The elements oxygen and iron can react to form a brown powder.

Oxygen and mercury react to form a toxic orange powder. Oxygen and hydrogen react to form a clear refreshing liquid, and so on. Though the steps may be complicated, all of these reactions can be reversed, elements can be separated again, and the amount of each element we get back after separation, is always exactly equal to the amount that had reacted to the form the compound in the first place.

Brilliant! Elements are real and they appear to be essentially indestructible but what are they made of? If you zoom in on one, a chunk of pure gold example, can you just keep zooming in for ever and ever, seeing nothing but pure good for infinity? In the early 1800s, a school teacher from England named John Dalton grew fascinated with chemistry.

Along with conducting several experiments of his own, he read about every experiment he possibly could paying special attention to the quantities of each element used up in every chemical reaction. In these numbers he was surprised to find a pattern. When 2 elements can react to form multiple types compounds, they always do so in small, whole number ratios.

The most logical explanation for this strange pattern is that the elements are made of tiny particles – atoms! He didn’t know exactly how small an atom was but numbers suggested that atoms of a single element were all nearly identical in size to each other but different in size to the atoms found in other elements.

In 1808 he wrote a 560 page book that briefly mentioned his discovery, and it even came with pictures. While scientists weren’t fully convinced that atoms were real, they found the concept of atoms extremely useful. The idea of atoms helped them make predictions and perform cleaner chemical reactions.

In 1905, Albert Einstein well, he was younger than that in 1905 Albert Einstein proposed an experiment and produced an equation that could be used, not only to confirm the existence of atoms, but to to determine exactly how big they are. A few years later, Jean Perrin used Einstein’s concept to actually do the experiments, confirming beyond reasonable doubt (at least to other physicists and mathematicians) that atoms do exist! If you happen to love math and posses an in depth grasp of physics, great! You can turn off this video now and read Perrin’s paper.

• For the rest of us, however, seeing is believing.
• Individual atoms are too small to be seen with normal light, because of this, they cannot be seen with a normal microscope.
• In the 1980s, a group of engineers lead by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer began working on what they called the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope.

A microscope they hoped would let us take undistorted images of many different types of atoms. This is an actual scan of silicon atoms forming the surface of a crystal. The colors here are artificial, assigned to different data points received during the scan, but this is real data showing the actual pattern of silicon atoms arranged in the sample.

• Later work by Dr Wilson Ho, improved the technique and cleaned up the presentation of data.
• While “feeling” the atoms does give us some good information, researchers still wanted more.
• A group lead by Dr Ara Apkarian of the National Science Foundation’s CaSTL research center, discovered a way to use actual light to see atoms.

In the past, this was thought to be impossible because the wavelength of light is so much larger than an atom, but by shooting light at the tip of a probe in a modified scanning tunneling microscope, they were able to essentially shrink the light’s wavelength, and get it to scatter off the sample onto a detection screen.

• By moving the sample bit by bit, hitting it with light again each time, they were able to piece together this image of a single nitrogen atom.
• Each pixel, representing an individual data point from the scan.
• If we smooth it out, sharpen the edges, and change their chosen color scheme, it is shocking to find how close John Dalton’s old drawings actually were to reality.

Our species has finally done it. Over 2000 after Democritus first proposed the idea of an atom, we have now received direct, visual confirmation. Atoms exist! So what is an atom? Atoms are the fundamental building blocks of chemistry. How do we know they exist? Through chemical reactions we can witness their effects.
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How did Einstein mathematically prove the existence of atoms?

Answer and Explanation: Albert Einstein proved the existence of atoms by establishing equations showing and predicting the motion of particles in liquid. In 1827, the discovery of movement on particles by Robert Brown on a microscope was a scientific mystery.
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How do scientists study particles?

The Science – Scientists use particle accelerators to speed up electrically charged particles to nearly the speed of light. They then smash those particles together to study the new particles that form, including quarks. However, free quarks cannot be directly observed in isolation due to color confinement.

This phenomenon means certain particles, including quarks and gluons, cannot be isolated. This makes it difficult to study those particles. Now, a team has developed a new method to simulate how quarks combine and interact to make up the larger particles that form the atom’s nucleus, These simulations need a lot of computing power.

One way to make them simpler is to simulate quarks that are heavier than the quarks found in nature. Thanks to the power of the Summit supercomputer, the team simulated much lighter quarks than possible in the past. The combination of the power of Summit with the new method created more realistic results.
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How do scientists study quarks?

Answer and Explanation: Scientists generally study quarks using particle accelerators as it’s only here that enough energy is produced to study free quarks. At lower temperatures and energy levels quarks bind together to form other particles like protons and neutrons and cannot be studied on their own.
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How do scientists learn about atoms and molecules?

If there is no way in the world to see an atom, then how do we know that the atom is made of protons, electrons, neutrons, the nucleus and the electron cloud? There are three ways that scientists have proved that these sub-atomic particles exist. They are direct observation, indirect observation or inferred presence and predictions from theory or conjecture.

Scientists in the 1800’s were able to infer a lot about the sub-atomic world from chemistry. The great Periodic Table of Elements by Mendeleyev gave scientists two very important things. The regularity of the table and the observed combinations of chemical compounds prompted some scientists to infer that atoms had regular repeating properties and that maybe they had similar structures.

Scientists made numerous conjectures and some theoretical predictions about what the nature of atomic structure really was. The weights of the elements were found to increase as the elements advanced through the periodic chart and there seemed to be a number, called the atomic number that explained the regular chemical properties.

1. The other big thing that the chart did was to help chemists predict the elements that they had not found.
2. This business of filling in the holes has continued today as new elements are added to the end of the table every few years.
3. A lot was learned by logic and reason and correctly assembling previous knowledge.

The holes in that knowledge were filled by inference, conjecture and discovery. Other scientists studying the discharge effects of electricity in gasses made some direct discoveries.J.J. Thompson was the first to observe and understand the small particles called electrons,

• These were called cathode rays because they came from the cathode, or negative electrode, of these discharge tubes.
• It was quickly learned that electrons could be formed into beams and manipulated into images that would ultimately become television.
• Electrons could also produce something else.
• Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895.

His discovery was a byproduct of studying electrons. Protons could also be observed directly as well as ions as “anode” rays. These positive particles made up the other half of the atomic world that the chemists had already worked out. The chemists had measured the mass or weight of the elements.

The periodic chart and chemical properties proved that there was an atomic number also. This atomic number was eventually identified as the charge of the nucleus or the number of electrons surrounding an atom which is almost always found in a neutral, or balanced, state. Rutherford proved in 1911, that there was a nucleus.

He did this directly by shooting alpha particles at other atoms, like gold, and observing that sometimes they bounced back the way they came. There was no way this could be explained by the current picture of the atom which was thought to be a homogeneous mix.

1. Rutherford proved directly by scattering experiments that there was something heavy and solid at the center.
2. The nucleus was discovered.
3. For about 20 years the nucleus was thought to consist of a number of protons to equal the atomic weight and some electrons to reduce the charge so the atomic number came out right.

This was very unsettling to many scientists. There were predictions and conjectures that something was missing. In 1932 Chadwick found that a heavy neutral particle was emitted by some radioactive atoms. This particle was about the same mass as a proton, but it had a no electric charge.

This was the “missing piece” (famous last words). The nucleus could now be much better explained by using neutrons and protons to make up the atomic weight and atomic number. This made much better sense of the atomic world. There were now electrons equal to the atomic number surrounding the nucleus made up of neutrons and protons.

Mr. Roentgen’s x-rays allowed scientists to measure the size of the atom. The x-rays were small enough to discern the atomic clouds. This was done by scattering x-rays from atoms and measuring their size just as Rutherford had done earlier by hitting atoms with other nuclei starting with alpha particles.

The 1930’s were also the time when the first practical particle accelerators were invented and used. These early machines made beams of protons. These beams could be used to measure the size of the atomic nucleus. And the search goes on today. Scientists are still filling in the missing pieces in the elementary particle world.

Where will it end? Around about 1890, scientists were lamenting the death of physics and pondering a life reduced to measuring the next decimal point! Discoveries made in the 1890’s proved that the surface had only been scratched. Each decade of the 1900’s has seen the frontier pushed to smaller and smaller objects.
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Is there a real picture of an atom?

Photo by David Nadlinger – University of Oxford Atoms are really small. So small, in fact, that it’s impossible to see one with the naked eye, even with the most powerful of microscopes. At least, that used to be true. Now, a photograph shows a single atom floating in an electric field, and it’s large enough to see without any kind of microscope. Photo by David Nadlinger – University of Oxford Even though the atom is visible, it’s still not easy to see. If you look very closely at the center of the photo, you’ll see a faint blue dot. That’s the strontium atom, illuminated by a blue-violet laser.

This particular apparatus uses strontium because of its size: Strontium has 38 protons, and the diameter of a strontium atom is a few millionths of a millimeter. Normally this would still be much too small to see, but this setup employs a clever trick to make the atom much brighter. The strontium atom in the photo is hit by a high-powered laser, which causes the electrons orbiting the strontium atom to become more energized.

Occasionally, these energized electrons will give off light. With enough energized electrons giving off enough light, it’s possible for an ordinary camera to image the atom. Still, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to see the atom with your naked eye. This image is a long exposure shot, which means even with all that laser light, it’s still too faint to pick up without equipment.
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Has anyone ever seen an electron?

No physicist has ever ‘seen’ an electron. Yet, all physicists believe in the existence of electrons. An intelligent but superstitious man advances this analogy to argue that ‘ghosts’ exist even though no one has ‘seen’ one. How will you refute his argument? Answer Verified Hint: Science including physics doesn’t conclude a theory by just being acceptable because something else is accepted similarly.

Complete answer: Additional Information: Note:

Physics and all other branches of science work with a common motto – to derive, prove and apply theories and hypotheses in the most scientific method so that they do not suffer any allegations in future. Every conclusion in Physics is after thorough cross-check and experiments done by brilliant minds all around the world.

1. The scientists are a community who study things and its behaviours from observable experiments.We need to look back at the time when J.J Thomson discovered the existence of electrons.
2. He and his assistants worked on a series of experiments after which, the cathode-ray tube experiment gave him astonishing results which revealed the possibility of existence of negatively charged particles in a neutral atom.

The scientist after his ground-breaking discovery had to undergo world-wide scrutiny to finally get acceptance from the world scientific community.Later on, many experiments including Rutherford’s scattering experiment gave stronger evidence to the existence of charged particles in the atom.

For sure, no one has seen this particle, which was later explained by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.On the other hand, the theories on the existence of ghosts are created by the human folk for experiences or incidents which they couldn’t find a reason for yet.The not ‘seen’ part of electrons and ghosts are.

Thus, no way relatable.The ancient people, even some of the modern folks believe in the ghost stories as they couldn’t be satisfied with another possible explanation.The validation of a scientific discovery or proof involves a hypothesis, an experimental proof, a theoretical proof, absence of allegations and valuable observations and inferences.

It takes sometimes, hundreds of years for a theory to be proved, like the existence of gravitational waves. : No physicist has ever ‘seen’ an electron. Yet, all physicists believe in the existence of electrons. An intelligent but superstitious man advances this analogy to argue that ‘ghosts’ exist even though no one has ‘seen’ one.

How will you refute his argument?
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What is the smallest thing in the universe?

As far as we can tell, quarks can’t be broken down into smaller components, making them the smallest things we know of. In fact, they’re so small that scientists aren’t sure they even have a size: they could be immeasurably small! We do know that they’re at least 10 18 (or one quintillion) times smaller than Alice.
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Are we sure atoms exist?

Even a person with the sharpest eyes in all of history could not possibly have seen an atom. And yet, we all know that atoms exist and that they are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. In fact, none of us probably questioned any of those claims, in spite of the fact that we’ve never seen anything as small as, or smaller than, an atom. Seeing the various orbital spheres of electrons inside the hydrogen atom was a proof that atoms exist. (Image: Dmitrii Leikin/Shutterstock)
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How did scientists know atoms without seeing?

Discovery of atoms and the instruments used to see them Know how scientists discovered atoms and the instruments that help them view these small particles Learn about the discovery of atoms and the instruments scientists use to see these. © American Chemical Society () It’s hard to imagine just how tiny atoms are.

One sheet of paper is roughly half a million atoms thick. Volume wise, one atom is as small compared to an apple as that apple is to the entire earth. So you might be surprised to learn that chemists can actually see atoms, not with their eyes, with incredibly precise tools. The idea of atoms stretches back to ancient Greece when the philosopher Democritus declared that all matter is made of tiny particles.

The philosopher Plato even decided- wrongly- that different substances had different shaped atoms, like pyramids or cubes. The first modern evidence for atoms appears in the early 1800s when British chemist John Dalton discovered that chemicals always contain whole number ratios of atoms.

1. That’s why it’s H2O and not it’s H20.4O or H square root of 17O.
2. The reason for these whole numbers, Dalton suggested, was because you can’t have a half of an atom or 0.2 atoms, only whole atoms.
3. It’s actually kind of hard to imagine chemistry today without Dalton’s insight, but it was controversial during its day.

Why? Because chemists couldn’t see atoms. Many considered them like negative numbers- useful for calculating things, but not existing in the real world. Even Dmitri Mendeleev, father of the periodic table, refused to believe in atoms for many years. So why didn’t chemists just look for atoms under microscopes? To see something under a microscope, the wavelength of light you’re shining through the microscope can’t be larger than whatever you’re looking at.

Unfortunately, visible light is thousands of times bigger than atoms. So chemists had to wait for a light with short wavelengths, like X-rays. X-rays were discovered in the 1890s by German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen, who realized that photographs taken with X-rays allowed him to see through objects. Roentgen thought he’d gone insane when he saw this.

But today we’re all familiar with X-rays from trips to the dentist and doctor. Chemists don’t use X-rays to see through things, however. Instead, they bounce X-rays off things like crystals, which are solids with layers of atoms. When X-rays hit an atom in the crystal, they bounce back.

1. Others slip through and bounce off the second layer down or the third layer or deeper.
2. After being reflected, these X-rays strike a detector screen like the ball bouncing back in Pong.
3. And based on the pattern of where they strike the wall, scientists can work backward and figure out the 3D arrangement of atoms in the crystal.

This reflection and interaction of light rays is called diffraction. X-ray diffraction, sometimes called X-ray crystallography, has led to dozens of Nobel prizes for chemists since the 1920s. It also led to one of the biggest discoveries in science history- the structure of DNA.

1. James Watson and Francis Crick get credit nowadays.
2. But they based their work on the work of Rosalind Franklin, a crystallographer in England.
3. She began taking X-ray pictures of DNA in 1952.
4. And Watson’s glimpse of one picture, photograph 51, was a vital clue in determining that DNA was a double helix.

This incident actually remains controversial today because Franklin never gave Watson permission to view photograph 51. If X-rays let chemists peer at the structure of atoms, scanning tunneling microscopes finally revealed the atoms themselves. Rather than bounce light off something, an STM runs a sharp needle over the surface.

It’s like chemical braille except the tip never quite touches. As the tip moves along the surface, scientists can reconstruct the atomic landscape, making individual atoms visible at last in the early 1980s. Lo and behold, the atoms weren’t Plato’s cubes and pyramids but spheres of different sizes. By 1989, a few scientists had even adapted STM technology to manipulate xenon atoms and spell out words.

Discovery of Protons || Grade 9 || Don’t Memorise

We’ll let you guess what company they worked for. Also in 1989, the chemist Ahmed Zewail moved beyond looking at stationary atoms and developed tools to see atoms in action. Zewail wanted to study how atoms break bonds and swap partners during reactions.

So he developed the world’s fastest camera, which shoot pulses of laser light a few femtoseconds long, a few billionths of a microsecond. While Zewail’s laser flashed like a strobe, his camera snapped pictures. Zewail then ran the pictures together like a slow motion replay. Since then, femtochemistry has provided insight into everything from ozone depletion to the working of the human retina.

Zewail won a Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry in 1999. The ancient Greeks dreamed up fanciful shapes for atoms, but it took 2,400 years before scientists could see them for real and study their behavior. Seeing truly is believing for human beings, and it was chemists and other scientists who fulfilled this need and finally revealed what our universe is made of.
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Are atoms a theory or fact?

Matter is made up of things called atoms, elements, and molecules. But have you ever wondered if atoms and molecules are real? Would you be surprised to find out that humans have never seen an atom? For this reason, atoms are still considered a theory, a very strong theory, but a theory none the less.
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What is smaller than a quark?

Quarks and gluons are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, which in turn are the building blocks of atomic nuclei, Scientists’ current understanding is that quarks and gluons are indivisible—they cannot be broken down into smaller components.

• They are the only fundamental particles to have something called color-charge.
• Quarks can have a positive or negative electric charge (like protons and neutrons).
• Gluons have no electric charge.
• Both quarks and gluons have three additional states of charge: positive and negative redness, greenness, and blueness.

These so-called color charges are just names—they are not related to actual colors. The force that connects positive and negative color charges is called the strong nuclear force. This strong nuclear force is the most powerful force involved with holding matter together.

It is much stronger than the three other fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak nuclear forces. Because the strong nuclear force is so powerful, it makes it extremely difficult to separate quarks and gluons. Because of this, quarks and gluons are bound inside composite particles. The only way to separate these particles is to create a state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma.

In this plasma, the density and temperature are so high that protons and neutrons melt. This soup of quarks and gluons permeated the entire universe until a few fractions of a second after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled enough that quarks and gluons froze into protons and neutrons.
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Can protons exist on their own?

Stability – Unsolved problem in physics : Are protons fundamentally stable? Or do they decay with a finite lifetime as predicted by some extensions to the standard model? The free proton (a proton not bound to nucleons or electrons) is a stable particle that has not been observed to break down spontaneously to other particles.

• Free protons are found naturally in a number of situations in which energies or temperatures are high enough to separate them from electrons, for which they have some affinity.
• Free protons exist in plasmas in which temperatures are too high to allow them to combine with electrons,
• Free protons of high energy and velocity make up 90% of cosmic rays, which propagate in vacuum for interstellar distances.

Free protons are emitted directly from atomic nuclei in some rare types of radioactive decay, Protons also result (along with electrons and antineutrinos ) from the radioactive decay of free neutrons, which are unstable. The spontaneous decay of free protons has never been observed, and protons are therefore considered stable particles according to the Standard Model.

• However, some grand unified theories (GUTs) of particle physics predict that proton decay should take place with lifetimes between 10 31 and 10 36 years.
• Experimental searches have established lower bounds on the mean lifetime of a proton for various assumed decay products.
• Experiments at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan gave lower limits for proton mean lifetime of 6.6 × 10 33 years for decay to an antimuon and a neutral pion, and 8.2 × 10 33 years for decay to a positron and a neutral pion.

Another experiment at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada searched for gamma rays resulting from residual nuclei resulting from the decay of a proton from oxygen-16. This experiment was designed to detect decay to any product, and established a lower limit to a proton lifetime of 2.1 × 10 29 years,

However, protons are known to transform into neutrons through the process of electron capture (also called inverse beta decay ). For free protons, this process does not occur spontaneously but only when energy is supplied. The equation is: p + + e − → n + ν e The process is reversible; neutrons can convert back to protons through beta decay, a common form of radioactive decay,

In fact, a free neutron decays this way, with a mean lifetime of about 15 minutes. A proton can also transform into neutrons through beta plus decay (β+ decay). According to quantum field theory, the mean proper lifetime of protons becomes finite when they are accelerating with proper acceleration, and decreases with increasing, Acceleration gives rise to a non-vanishing probability for the transition p + → n + e + + ν e, This was a matter of concern in the later 1990s because is a scalar that can be measured by the inertial and coaccelerated observers, In the inertial frame, the accelerating proton should decay according to the formula above. However, according to the coaccelerated observer the proton is at rest and hence should not decay.

This puzzle is solved by realizing that in the coaccelerated frame there is a thermal bath due to Fulling–Davies–Unruh effect, an intrinsic effect of quantum field theory. In this thermal bath, experienced by the proton, there are electrons and antineutrinos with which the proton may interact according to the processes: (i) p + + e − → n + ν, (ii) p + + ν → n + e + and (iii) p + + e − + ν → n,

Adding the contributions of each of these processes, one should obtain,
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Do strange quarks exist?

characteristics –

In quark: Quark flavours Strange quarks (charge − 1 / 3 e ) occur as components of K mesons and various other extremely short-lived subatomic particles that were first observed in cosmic rays but that play no part in ordinary matter.

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Do some atoms disappear?

Answer and Explanation: No, atoms can’t disappear. The Law of Conservation of Mass states matter cannot be created or destroyed.
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Is An atom Indestructible?

One of the main ways forensic scientists and chemists analyze the data they collect is using a piece of equipment called a spectrometer. You will be using several different types of spectrometers in your murder investigation so it will be important for you to understand how this piece of equipment works.

• But to understand this you will need some background information first, starting with the structure of the atom.
• The development of what we understand as the structure of the atom today started long ago.
• In the 5th century B.C.
• A philosopher named Democritus hypothesized that all matter (plus space and time) is composed of tiny indestructible units, called atoms.

Unfortunately for us, Aristotle, who was a much more popular philosopher at the time, disagreed with Democritus theory and thus the development of good atomic theory was set back by a couple of millennia. But eventually Democritus’ theory was rediscovered in a poem by the Roman poet Lucretius in 1417.

1. In Democritus’ theory, the atoms remain unchanged when reacted, but moved about in space to combine in various ways to form all macroscopic objects.
2. It is really amazing how close he got to the truth just by thinking it through.
3. Atomic Structure RicochetScience (YouTube) Unfortunately, it took roughly 400 years more for modern atomic theory to reemerge.

John Dalton began the theory with the following set of postulates.

All matter is made of atoms. Atoms are indivisible and indestructible. All atoms of a given element are identical in mass and properties. Compounds are formed by a combination of two or more different kinds of atoms. A chemical reaction is a rearrangement of atoms.

Looking at the postulates one by one there is both correct and incorrect aspects to each statement.

Atoms are not indivisible or indestructible. The invention of the atomic bomb proves this postulate false. But in the normal course of events (barring grandiose explosions) atoms remain together. While all atoms of a given element do have the same number of protons which gives them a great deal of their chemical character, they can vary in their mass and properties by changes in their number of neutrons and electrons. So again there is both truth and mistakes in the second postulate. The third and fourth postulates are where Dalton really got it right. Compounds are formed by the combination of atoms and a chemical reaction does lead to the rearrangement of atoms so these two postulates were dead on.

Now that we know that all matter is composed of atoms, the next logical question to ask is “what is an atom made of?” Atomic Structure is fairly simple. It is often described as similar to the solar system with the nucleus representing the sun and the electrons acting as the planets: The atom is composed of three types of particles located in two areas: The protons and neutrons are located in the nucleus and the electrons are located in energy levels surrounding the nucleus. Introduction to Atomic Structure Ian Stuart (YouTube) Copyright © No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright holders.
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What would an atom look like if it was big?

Just Ask: What Would a Supersized Atom Look Like? If you expanded an atom to the size of a baseball, what would it look like? And how would the inside look if you sliced it open? The nucleus is the atom’s central core and contains more than 99.9 percent of its mass. Surrounding the nucleus is a cloud of electrons, which makes up most of the atom’s volume.

But the nucleus is tiny, so fantastically tiny, that if the full atom was the size of your thumbnail, the nucleus would be no bigger than one cuticle cell in that thumbnail, says Jim Kakalios, a physics professor at University of Minnesota and author of the book, ‘The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics.’ And if the nucleus was expanded to the size of a marble, the outer edge of the atom would be nearly a football field away.

A quick primer on the atom: Atoms are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons are positively charged, electrons are negatively charged, and neutrons have no charge. Electrons are outside of the nucleus but bound to it by electromagnetic force; protons and neutrons are packed tightly inside, held together by a force that’s roughly 100 times stronger than electricity – the strong force, it’s called.

1. The center would be hard and very dense,” says Stephen Ekker, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Mayo Clinic.
2. And there would be a large volume all around it that’s mostly empty space If I were to model a nucleus, especially something with 20 or more protons and neutrons, I would get magnetic beads, and I would probably shape them into a sphere.” But here’s where it starts to get tricky.

The traditional atom model that shows electrons orbiting a central nucleus the way planets orbit the sun is a perfectly reasonable picture, according to Kakalios, since the force of attraction between electrons and protons is mathematically similar to the gravitational attraction between planets and their sun in the solar system.

1. But, he says, “it turns out to be completely wrong.” Electrons are defined not by their orbit, but by their wave patterns.
2. Just as strings on a guitar have different frequencies and octaves, atoms with different protons and electrons have different wave patterns The electron can only have certain energies, and this explains a tremendous amount of things.

It explains why each atom has a unique fingerprint.” To make things a little weirder, the electron cloud isn’t an actual cloud, in which electrons can be nailed down to a physical point in space. Rather, it’s an area of probability, in which the size of the atom is defined by the probability that an electron will be found at a certain distance from its nucleus.

1. So the answer is, if you expanded an atom to a size we could see, it wouldn’t look much like anything.
2. There would be a small little spot that would be the nucleus, and there would be a vast region with a buzzing of electrons,” Kakalios says.
3. And if you start to ask, where is the electron, really? that’s when you start getting into the late-night philosophical questions.

Then it goes into a different realm.” Email your Just Ask! questions to [email protected] with “Science Question” in the subject line. : Just Ask: What Would a Supersized Atom Look Like?
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How do you know if an element is made up of molecules?

Molecular Elements – There are many substances that exist as two or more atoms connected together so strongly that they behave as a single particle. These multi-atom combinations are called molecules, A molecule is the smallest part of a substance that has the physical and chemical properties of that substance.

Table \(\PageIndex \): Elements That Exist as Diatomic Molecules

Hydrogen, H	Oxygen	Nitrogen	Fluorine	Chlorine	Bromine	Iodine

Some elements exist naturally as molecules. For example, hydrogen and oxygen exist as two-atom molecules. Other elements also exist naturally as diatomic molecules —a molecule with only two ato ms (Table \(\PageIndex \)). As with any molecule, these elements are labeled with a molecular formula, a formal listing of what and how many atoms are in a molecule.

(Sometimes only the word formula is used, and its meaning is inferred from the context.) For example, the molecular formula for elemental hydrogen is H 2, with H being the symbol for hydrogen and the subscript 2 implying that there are two atoms of this element in the molecule. Other diatomic elements have similar formulas: O 2, N 2, and so forth.

Other elements exist as molecules—for example, sulfur normally exists as an eight-atom molecule, S 8, while phosphorus exists as a four-atom molecule, P 4 (Figure \(\PageIndex \)). Figure \(\PageIndex \): Molecular Art of S 8 and P 4 Molecules. If each green ball represents a sulfur atom, then the diagram on the left represents an S 8 molecule. The molecule on the right shows that one form of elemental phosphorus exists, as a four-atom molecule.

Figure \(\PageIndex \) shows two examples of how molecules will be represented in this text. An atom is represented by a small ball or sphere, which generally indicates where the nucleus is in the molecule. A cylindrical line connecting the balls represents the connection between the atoms that make this collection of atoms a molecule.

This connection is called a chemical bond.
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How do you know you made a molecule?

A molecule is two or more atoms joined (or ‘bonded’) tightly together. The number and kinds of atoms in a molecule, and the way they are arranged, determine what substance it makes. For example, a molecule made of two oxygen atoms joined to one carbon atom forms carbon dioxide, a colorless gas.
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