Is the Atom Made of Anything?
Author: Vatika
Our world is quite diverse due to the different types of phenomena that exist around us. There are humans and other animals, the sky and the sea, water and fire, and so much more. What’s fascinating is that all of these very different things are made up of the same fundamental building blocks: atoms.1 Atoms are made up of three subatomic particles called neutrons, protons, and electrons.2 Neutrons and protons are located in the centre of the atom, known as the nucleus, while electrons orbit the nucleus in different cloud-like shapes, (known as scientifically as orbitals and energy states) with a specific number of electrons in those energy states (similar to how you can get different types of balloon animals and shapes by twisting one balloon or combining it with another balloon most easily).3 The composition of an atom's protons and neutrons will determine what kind of element it is on the periodic table, like oxygen, carbon or gold or any other element.4
If you have seen any media from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, such as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, you may have heard them talking about the quantum realm and how they become super, super tiny in that completely different world, but what does this actually mean? And does that mean there is something smaller than the components of an atom? Something has to make up a proton, right?
Turns out, there are smaller particles than an atom! Originally, when the Ancient Greeks named the atom, they thought it was uncuttable, therefore making it the smallest particle.5 However, we now know that is false and the meaning of the name atom “not cuttable,” is something of a misnomer.6
Over the years, many different subatomic particles have been discovered by scientists, including particles that are even smaller than protons! However, the primary ones that make up protons and neutrons are known as quarks.
Protons and neutrons, in 1960, were discovered to be made up of quarks to help create the structure of the nucleus of an atom.7 Due to experiments at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, it is estimated that quarks are at least 10,000 times smaller than a proton!8 Quarks have a variety of properties that create six different types of quarks in total.9 It is a specific combination of three types of quarks that create one proton and one neutron.10
Other than quarks, there are also the subatomic particles called photons. Photons showcase a weird property that no other particles possess which is known as wave-particle duality.11 This means that they have properties that are representative of both a wave and a particle.12 Generally speaking, when a photon interacts with something, like say bumping into an electron, it will behave as a particle but its wave-like property comes into play because scientists may not be able to know where and when the photon will bump into that electron.13 But scientists can make an estimation by using the same math formulas they would when they play around with waves. Photons have the ability to function as a light particle.14 This is actually what all the light around us is made of, including the light from your coloured LED lights and even the Sun (or at least, what our eye interprets when a photon interacts with it after having travelled to our eye, as a wave).
And there are so many more subatomic particles and more being discovered through the experiments of physicists trying to understand the fundamentals of our world. It’s kind of like Inception but instead of dreams, we’re going deeper and deeper into the levels of the subatomic world. Maybe one day we will be able to shrink to the size of a photon and travel to the tiny world of subatomic particles and see if there are other civilizations there, like in Ant-Man.
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"Orbitals: Crash Course Chemistry #25." CrashCourse. August 5, 2013. Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPDptc0wUYI&ab_channel=CrashCourse.
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Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "quark." Encyclopedia Britannica, March 6, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/science/quark.
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Sutter, Paul. "What Are Photons?" Live Science. March 10, 2022. https://www.livescience.com/what-are-photons#section-bibliography.
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