Two of the most extraordinary men in the history of science worked here in the Physics Department of Manchester University between 1911 and 1916: they were Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr. ibid.
He [Rutherford] would show humanity for the first time the inside of an atom ... Rutherford knew that this minute world – one tenth of a millionth of a millimetre across – had its own internal structure. Within the atoms is a sub-atomic world. And Ernest Rutherford thought that he knew what it looked like. ibid.
Rutherford atoms is almost entirely empty space. ibid.
Bohr was so captivated by Rutherford’s picture of the atom that he made it his mission to solve the puzzles of why the atom didn’t collapse, and why there was so much empty space. ibid.
One of the most complicated concepts in the whole of science but one that underpins the entire universe: Bohr described the atom not as a solar system but as a multi-storey building: the ground floor is where the nucleus lives with the electrons occupying the floors above. Mysterious laws mean the electrons can only live on the floors never in-between. And other mysterious laws mean that sometimes they can instantaneously jump from one floor to another. These are what we call Quantum jumps. ibid.
The old school reacted angrily. Leading the traditionalists was the giant from the Physics world Albert Einstein. He hated Bohr’s ideas. And he was going to fight them. Anything to save the world of order and common sense from this assault by madness. ibid.
The question [Wolfgang] Pauli’s idea tried to answer was this: every atoms is made of the same simple components, so why do they appear to us in so many different guises, in such a rich variety of colours, textures and chemical properties. ibid.
He [Schrodinger] argued that the electron actually was the wave of energy vibrating so fast it looked like a cloud around the atom. A cloud-like wave of pure energy ... The equation he came up with we call Schrodinger’s wave equation. ibid.
If we know where an electron is at a particular moment in time, we cannot know how fast it is moving. But if we knew the speed, we wouldn’t know the position ... It became known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle. ibid.
They’re self-contradictory: they behave both like particles and waves. And it gets weirder. When you’re not looked at an atom it behaves like a spread-out wave. But when you look to see where it is, it behaves like a particle. This is insane. ibid.
Hydrogen which is the simplest element consists of just one sphere which Rutherford called a proton (which is the Greek word for first). All the other elements are made by adding more protons to the nucleus. It’s as simple as that. So helium which is the second lightest element comprises of two protons; lithium has three; carbon which is the element that is the basis for all life has six protons; the oxygen that we breathe has eight. And uranium which is the heaviest naturally occurring element has ninety-two protons. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Atom: The Key to the Cosmos
What Chadwick discovered was that along with the proton there’s another kind of particle inside the nucleus: it weighs almost exactly the same as a proton but is much more elusive because it carries no electrical charge ... electrically neutral, hence its name the neutron. ibid.
What sticks them together? What stops the protons from flying apart? The answer was big news. It was nothing less than an entirely new force of Nature ... The strong nuclear force. ibid.
In the last one hundred years we have peered deep inside the atom, the basic building block of the universe. And inside this tiny object we have found a strange new world governed by exotic laws that at times seem to defy reason. Atoms present us with dizzying contradictions. They can behave as particles or waves. They appear to be in more than one place at the same time. They force us to rethink what we mean by past and future, by cause and effect. And they tell us strange things about where the universe came from and where’s it’s going. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Atom: The Illusion of Reality
The measurement problem ... An atom only appears in a particular place if you measure it. In other words an atom is spread out all over the place until a conscious observer decides to look at it. So the act of measurement or observation creates the entire universe. ibid.
The quark is a tricky and illusive beast. There are six different kinds or flavours of quark: up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. Also, quarks never exist in isolation. ibid.
But as soon as you delve deeper into the atom things get stranger. Hidden within the maze of mathematics were the descriptions of an array of sub-atomic particles no-one had ever seen before. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Lost Horizons: The Big Bang, BBC 2016
Atomic scientists, by a series of brilliant discoveries, have brought us to the threshold of a new age. Queen Elizabeth II, opening of Calderhall nuclear station
So an atom and its electron are multivariable objects. Professor David Deutsch, Oxford University
And these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them. H G Wells, The World Set Free, 1914
The first atomic bomb was assembled at Los Alamos, a secret laboratory in New Mexico. The Atomic Bomb Story: Trinity & Beyond, 1995
The blast instantly raised temperatures to ten million degrees, releasing a force of a million pounds of pressure, vaporizing the tower and all desert life within half a mile. ibid.
The Little Boy bomb was detonated over Hiroshima at an altitude of 1,800 feet to achieve maximum blast effect. ibid.
The world was made of atoms. And they were made up of three fundamental particles: protons and neutrons packed into a nucleus, surrounded by electrons moving in orbits. Michael Mosley, The Story of Science: Proof & Passion, BBC 2010
The electron is an unbelievably weird beast, and you simply cannot pin it down. An electron is never in just one place: it flits around as if it were in many places at the same time .... The behaviour of electrons could only be described not as certainties but as probabilities. Not where electrons are, but where they are likely to be. The new theory was known as Quantum. ibid.
Scientists calculate it took 380,000 years for the electrons to slow down enough so that the universe could start mass-producing atoms. How the Universe Works: Big Bang, Discovery 2010
The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth – the atoms that make up the human body – are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars – the high mass ones among them – went unstable in their later years – they collapsed and then exploded – scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy – guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems – stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small, ’cause they’re small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars. Neil deGrasse Tyson
Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us. Neil deGrasse Tyson
The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust. Neil deGrasse Tyson
In some radioactive atoms the nucleus is spontaneously ejecting electrons: this transforms the atom to a different element... where did the missing energy go? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still VI, Fox 2014
Physicists discovered that the atoms of each unstable element decay at a constant rate. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey: The Clean Room VII
In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world ... all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else. John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality
The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervour by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and forgotten; and one can predict that the day is not far in the future when a sufficient collection of facts will permit determination of the internal architecture of molecules. A series of experiments directed toward such a goal is the object of this paper. Wilhelm Körner