Understanding the “Law of Attraction”, An Introduction to The Atom
To even begin to understand the so-called “Law of Attraction” you need to start at the beginning and understand what an atom is. The following is an easy to read report written by Seth when he was told to “make a model of an atom” which is impossible to do if you have any clue as to what an atom really is. Unfortunately our schools still teach children science of more than fifty years ago so they will not understand. Fortunately, Seth is now home-schooled. This is quite interesting and informative and basic enough to understand. Enjoy.
The Story of The Atom and Why I Cannot Make a Model of One
Back in ancient times, people decided that everything was made of something, but they didn’t know what. The idea of everything being made of really tiny bits of stuff was devised by Democritus in 530 B.C. Back then people didn’t have last names.
Then, in 1808, an English school teacher and scientist named John Dalton proposed the “modern” atomic theory. Dalton decided that the atom was nothing more than a tiny indivisible sphere, and people believed this for a long time.
In 1897, a British physicist, J. J. Thomson did a series of experiments wiith electric current.
He ran electric current from one electrode to another through some gas. This produced a beam which he called a “cathode ray”.
The cathode rays were made of tiny, negatively charged particles, which he then called electrons.
He figured that the electrons must have come from the gas atoms or the metal electrode and since there was nothing else in the tubes, this made sense.
He also figured that the electrons must be really , really small, and that all atoms had them.
Later, an American Physicist named Robert Milikan measured the electrical charge of an electron. He also came to the conclusion that electrons were way smaller than any other part of the atom.
Then other scientists came up with these ideas:
1) Because the electron was negatively charged and atoms are electrically neutral, there must be a positive charge somewhere in the atom.
2) Because electrons are so much smaller than atoms, there must be other, more massive particles in the atom.
With all this information Thomson came up with a model of the atom that was like a watermelon. The red part was the positive charge and the seeds were the electrons.
Then Rutherford came along and did some experiments with gold. He concluded that the gold atoms were mostly empty space. However, some small region of the atom must be very dense . He called this dense region the nucleus, and decided that the nucleus comprised most of the mass of the atom.
Then, to offset the negative influence of the electrons, he proposed that protons exist too, only in the nucleus.
So, he envisioned the atom as the positively charged nucleus in the center with the negatively charged electrons circling around it much like a planet with moons. Although he had no evidence that the electrons circled the nucleus, his model seemed to make sense.
This is the kind of model most kids in school make, but it does not make sense. This is because
as the electrons move in a circle, they would lose energy and give off light. The loss of energy would slow the electrons down. Like any satellite, the slowing electrons would fall into the nucleus.
It was calculated that a Rutherford atom would last only billionths of a second before collapsing, so this is obviously not a good model to use.
In 1913, a Danish physicist named Niels Bohr came up with a new model of the atom. Bohr decided that the electrons orbiting an atom could only exist at certain energy levels. Different energy levels means that they would have to be at different levels from the nucleus, not at continuous levels as might be expected from Rutherford’s model.
When atoms in the gas tubes absorbed the energy from the electric current, the electrons became excited and jumped from low energy levels to high energy levels. That means that they would be moving from close to the nucleus to farther from the nucleus. Then, the excited electrons would fall back to their original levels and give off energy as light.
So then he came up with the shell idea. He decided that each electron orbit of the same size or energy (shell) could only hold so many electrons. The first shell would have 2 electrons, the second shell would have 8, and the third shell or higher would have 8. Since he couldn’t actually see the electrons nobody knows why he came up with this model, but it seemed to make sense at the time.
The Bohr model could explain the spectra of atoms with one electron in the outer shell very well, but was not very good for those with more than one electron in the outer shell.
Some smart people questioned why electrons should be confined to certain energy levels, and. more importantly, why don’t electrons give off light all the time?
Then, in 1924, a French physicist named Louis de Broglie came along and suggested that electrons could act as both particles and waves, just like light. People thought he was a little crazy.
Later, an Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrodinger figured out that the French guy was correct!
In fact, the whole question of where exactly the electrons were was one of probabilities. The electrons could be in any of a number of “electron density clouds” called “orbitals”. You have to find the densest area of the cloud to have the highest probality of finding the electron.
There are lots of other variables, too. Like: what is the energy level of the electron? How fast is it moving? What is the shape of the orbital? Where is it in space? Which direction is the electron spinning?
Another problem is that there are all kinds of “sub-atomic particles” that are part of the atom such as:
Six “flavours” quarks: up, down, bottom, top, strange, and charm;
Six types of leptons: electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tauon, tauon neutrino;
Twelve gauge bosons (force carriers): the photon of electromagnetism, the three W and Z bosons of the weak force, and the eight gluons of the strong force. I am not making this up! There is a lot of stuff in an atom and it is all energy.
There are a few other problems with making a “model of an atom”.
Protons and neutrons are 2000x more massive than the electrons.
Most of an atom is empty space — the electron cloud is a trillion times bigger than the nucleus.
So if I made a nucleus of styrofoam balls, the electrons would be invisible, and somewhere in Texas…maybe.
Here is a picture, but it doesn’t give the actual perspective, just an idea. It’s really not even very close.
Now, there are some other very interesting things about atoms. The electrons will show up as either particles or waves, depending on what the experimenters expect! Some people think that the “usual” form is the wave, so what we think (expect) turns that wave into a particle (matter).
Another thing is that 99.99999% of an atom (or anything) is empty space. There is so much empty space that if you could remove all the empty space, everything in the universe that’s left would fit into the palm of your hand! Is it really empty space? Some people think that it is some kind of “plasma” which is a bunch of subatomic particles. That means that they are smaller than atoms, much smaller.
And the last, most important reason why I can’t make a model of an atom is this:
Electrons are negatively charged energy, protons are positively charged energy, and neutrons are neutral energy. An atom is energy surrounded by huge amounts of empty space and some more tiny bits of energy. An atom is not a solid. It is energy. How do you make a model of that? So I wrote this report instead, to set the record straight.
"What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday,
and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow:
Our life is the creation of our mind." ~Buddha
