Space - back to atoms

Having had far too much time on my hands of late (or so it seems!) I have been reading various space-related (or cosmological) books with vehement enthusiasm. Like en-cee, I find the proverbial "We're all made of stardust" quite awe-inspiring. So, I thought, the best place to feed my unrelenting hunger for cosmological knowledge was to investigate the very start of it all and enlighten myself from the 'atomic up', so to speak!

This is where I need to be careful or I could type for hours espousing my snippets of knowledge, questions, answers (of which there are few!) and competing theories. Perhaps I would be more sensible (and sympathetic to any readers) to offer excerpts of wisdom daily, rather than in a single blog entry.

So, first of all, I recalled my rudimentary and half-heeded teachings at school. Crucially, that "matter" is not infinitely divisible and that the smallest possible building block is an atom. My investigations of atoms produced the following facts:

• An atom is less-than a 10th of a millionth of a mm.


• A human hair is roughly 1 million atoms across


• There are more atoms in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the Earth's oceans

An atom is - as I recall from school - comprised of a nucleus (a number of protons and neutrons) and electrons. My reading unveiled that the element type - as seen in the periodic table - is determined by the number of protons/neutrons it possesses (excusing Hydrogen which has only 1 proton and no neutron). The nucleus is approximately 10,000 times smaller than the particle itself and is almost entirely 'empty space'.

This means that if you removed the empty space of the atoms that make you or I, we would actually be smaller than a single grain of salt (although we would, of course, still weigh the same as we do now).

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Now, the fundamental atomic facts I've mentioned above are fairly basic and relatively easy to comprehend but I find the concepts and scales quite incredible. The last paragraph, for instance, that without atomic 'empty space' I could be miniscule in size but still weight 10/11 stone is mindblowing - and this before I've even ventured to mention blackholes!

I'll give the 'lesson' a bit of a rest and pickup where I left off when I next have half an hour.

To those who think this is terribly boring - apologies. To everyone else - food for thought, eh...