• Question: Is there anything smaller than atoms

    Asked by 582bera34 to Colin, John, Kevin, Shikha, Triona on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Kevin Motherway

      Kevin Motherway answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      Yes. And they’re named subatomic particles. Atoms are made up of Protons and Nuetrons at their nucleus and electrons in orbit around the nucleus. But even those particles are made up of even smaller parts called “Quarks” and these have different 6 different “flavours” that add up to something either being a positivity charged proton or a neutron which has no charge!

      There’s a lot of Irish Connections with Atomic science: In 1891 Irish physicist George J. Stoney suggested the name electron ( from electric + on, as in ion).

      When Quarks were discovered by an American Physicist called Murray Gell-Man he was thinking he’d call them Qworks, but on reading the novel Finnegan’s Wake by Irish author James Joyce and seeing the word “Quarks” in the novel he decided that was what he’d call it and how it would be spelled.

      Ernest Walton from Dungarvan, Co. Waterford shared a Nobel Prize for Physics along with John Cockcroft in 1951 for being the first to split the Atom!

    • Photo: Shikha Sharma

      Shikha Sharma answered on 14 Nov 2014:

      Hi 582bera34,
      Yes. There are plenty!!! Atoms can be further broken up into smaller particles, called sub-atomic particles. Till mid of 20th century there are only 3 sub-atomic particles and we know them very well. These are electron, proton and neutron.
      Proton is positively charged with atomic mass of 1 amu and Neutron has atomic mass of 1 amu with no electrical charge. Both of them together form the core of atom called nucleus.
      Electron, on other hand, is negatively charged with nearly zero mass. Electron revolves around nucleus in an atom. However, in later stage there are many sub-atomic particles which were discovered. Scientists call the list as “Particle Zoo”. Few are very interesting.
      For example, anti-particles, anti-particles are exactly like electron, proton but only one property exactly opposite to them. Just to give you an example anti-particle of electron is positron and unlike electron positron is positively charged; ever other property of positron is same as electron. It is like you have someone exactly like you staying at your city but you are very angry young man and he/she is very calm and cool!!!!!
      There is one more interesting particle called photon, which carries electromagnetic force or rather quantum, the energy or force with governs all sub-atomic structures of universe. It also explains why light some time behaves like wave and sometimes like particle.
      Einstein was the 1st one who put forward the idea of Photon. The entire study of sub-atomic particles comes under the purview of “particle physics” – A very interesting field of modern physics which gives you an idea what are the basic building blocks of our universe and how universe was at very early stage when it was very small.
      You can study will particle physics to learn more about this at later stage!!!!!

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