And So On Up The Scale

Let us pause for a moment and consider the structure of the atom as we know it now. Every atom is made from three kinds of elementary particles: protons, which have a positive electrical charge; electrons, which have a negative electrical charge; and neutrons, which have no charge. Protons and neutrons are packed into the nucleus, while electrons spin around outside.

The number of protons is what gives an atom its chemical identity. An atom with one proton is an atom of hydrogen, one with two protons is helium, with three protons is lithium, and so on up the scale. Each time you add a proton you get a new element. (Because the number of protons in an atom is always balanced by an equal number of electrons, you will sometimes see it written that it is the number of electrons that defines an element; it comes to the same thing. The way it was explained to me is that protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.) Neutrons don't influence an atom's identity, but they do add to its mass. The number of neutrons is generally about the same as the number of protons, but they can vary up and down slightly. Add a neutron or two and you get an isotope. The terms you hear in reference to dating techniques in archeology refer to isotopes—carbon-14, for instance, which is an atom of carbon with six protons and eight neutrons (the fourteen being the sum of the two).

Grateful Dead: Dark Star...11/11/73

Neutrons and protons
occupy the atom's nucleus.
The nucleus of an atom is tiny--
only one millionth of a billionth
of the full volume of the atom--
but fantastically dense,
since it contains virtually
all the atom's mass.
As Cropper has put it,
if an atom were expanded
to the size of a cathedral,
the nucleus would be only
about the size of a fly--
but a fly many thousands
of times heavier
than the cathedral.
It was this spaciousness--
this resounding, unexpected roominess--
that had Rutherford scratching his head in 1910.
It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world--billiard balls are most often used for illustration--they don't actually strike each other. “Rather,” as Timothy Ferris explains, “the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other...were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.”

Grateful Dead: Dark Star...2/24/74

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

--Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything