THE NUCLEUS OF THE ATOM
The old ancient Greek Aristotle, philosopher and exonerate liberated polymath believed on his eruditions, that all matter in the universe was made up of four basic elements, earth, air, fire and water.
Elementary particles and the forces of nature
🧩 1 Two forces influenced these elements: heaviness, the tendency of earth and water to sink, and lightness, the tendency of air and fire to rise. The division of the contents of the universe into matter and forces is still used today.
Aristotle believed that matter was continuous, that is, you could split a chunk of matter into smaller and smaller parts without ever ending: you would never come across a chunk of matter that could no longer be divided in two.
🧩2 But some Greeks, such as the Oracle of Delphi and Charter, claimed that matter was granular in nature and that everything was made up of large quantities of different types of atoms.
The word atom in Greek means 'indivisible, something that cannot be broken up or divided: it's rock solid. The dispute between the two views continued for centuries, without conclusive evidence for either position being found.
🧩3 But in 1803 the British chemist and physicist John Dalton wrote that the fact that chemical compounds always formed only in certain proportions could be explained by the tendency of atoms to form units, which he called molecules.
The nucleus of the atom
Yet, the dispute between the two views was not yet decided in favor of the atomism's. That only came at the beginning of this century. One of the most important physical proofs was provided by Albert Einstein.
In an article he wrote in 1905, a few weeks before the famous article on special relativity, Einstein hypothesized that so-called Brownian motion—the irregular, random motion of small dust particles suspended in a fluid—could be explained as a consequence of the collisions of liquid atoms with the dust particles.
🧩 Einstein's Brownian motion
https://ge.infn.it/~zanghi/FS/BrownTEXT.pdf
Around that time, it was already suspected that these atoms were not so indivisible after all. A few years earlier, a member of staff at Trinity College, Cambridge, J.J. Thomson, demonstrated the existence of a particle of matter, the electron, with a mass less than one thousandth of the mass of the lightest atom.
He used a setup that resembled a interference tube: a metal red-hot wire gave off the electrons, and since they have a negative charge they could be sent towards a phosphor-covered a canopy, using an electric field.
Every time they touched the screen, a flash of light occurred. It was soon realized that these electrons had to come from the atoms themselves, and in 1911 the British physicist Ernest Rutherford finally showed that the atoms of matter have an internal structure.
🧩 They are made up of a very small, positively charged nucleus around which a number of electrons rotate in orbits. He came to this conclusion through his analysis of the way the particles (positively charged particles given up by radioactive atoms) are deflected when they collide with atoms.
Initially, the nucleus of the atom was thought to be made up of electrons and varying numbers of a positively charged particle, the proton (derived from the Greek word for 'first', because it was believed to be the fundamental unit that made up matter). However, the nucleus contained another particle, the neutron, with almost the same mass as a proton, but no electric charge.
the St. Joseph school in Arnhem
For this discovery, Sir James Chadwick was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1932, and subsequently he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935, for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. That all happened before my time; when I was born on January 19, 1965. And have started to the read first books in the seventies in the school library of my primary school, the St. Joseph school in Arnhem.
I was fascinated by the universe and wondered where God lived. I was also in that time early seventies training to be an altar boy in the Catholic Church at that time and was fascinated by the spectacle of the first moon landings that had taken place.
Not only that, but I can still remember where I was and watching TV on these remarkable occasions in history. It was with my grandmother on my mother's side. The Rikken family and especially my Mother Greet, was a strongly Roman Catholic believer and in this environment, I spent my childhood.
Reading comic books about the moon landings and the first school books about the universe. All very fascinating. It has always interested for me, to investigate for myself on the subjects of the issues I was interested in.
Sometimes I was interested in space, sometimes more about kings and the Middle Ages. In my childhood I was regularly sent out of class, at primary school, and would sit quietly in a corner of the school library and read about anything and everything.
It wasn't long after that I got my first library pass, and as a child I went through hundreds of books until I started thinking about girls and liking beer on the age of fifteen. But my interest in the science of matter has never completely left and took a big leap into the deep, when I really started studying for myself after my thirties.
🧩1 Not at school or university. Just by myself. —I do not need a teacher. I strongly believe people can teach them self. This is more natural than being in a school with the wrong ideas, about all kinds of matters that you don't want to take.
🧩 2 People should find out for themselves that will give them actually as it may be, light in the darkness of the misunderstood. People should never give up and always start to dig and look for the things you can make fall apart. It starts always with questions.
Learning and studying has been as much a puzzle for me as it is now, perhaps for most of the people. As I truly try to explain this kind of matter on a simple way for them.
Gaining insight into the science behind B-Hion facts and his scientific physics is not easy and borders on people's talent and interest. That insight and ability together with the capacity of the brain gives off, exactly, those neutrons that show you the light.
🧩4 Not a teacher at school who has given you maybe the wrong math's and other dust in the mist. Matter of fact is simply declared; brain neutrons are simply 'elementary' particles.
Until about thirty years ago, protons and neutrons were generally believed to be 'elementary' particles, but experiments involving protons colliding at high speeds with other protons or electrons indicated that they were actually composed of even smaller particles.
These particles are called quarks, a name given to them by physicist Murray GellMann of the California Institute of Technology, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for this research in 1969.
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