How big is an atom?
Take a piece of spaghetti and divided it 12 times. That comes out to be 4,096 pieces of spaghetti. If you were to divide each of those pieces 30 more times that would be about the size of an atom. Imagine that! Atoms are all around you. But the only way you can see an atom is by using an electron microscope, and magnifying it 30 million times. Imagine taking the bible an printing it on Gold Leaf. The bible would be no thicker then a standard piece of paper. Gold leaf is a hundred times thicker then an atom. The real size of an atom is 10-8 cm. If you would like information on what an Atom looks like on the inside, please go to my “inside an atom” at the bottom of this page. = 3 )) || ((navigator.appName == “Microsoft Internet Explorer”) && (parseInt(navigator.appVersion) >= 4 ))); function MSFPpreload(img) { var a=new Image(); a.
Let us begin by saying that anything we know about the atom today might be changed tomorrow. Science is constantly learning new things about the atom as atom-smashing machines are built. Oddly enough, the word atom comes from the Greek and means not divisible The ancient Greeks thought an atom to be the smallest possible particle of any substance. Yet today we have found more than 20 different particles in the core of the atom! Scientists believe the atom is made of electrons, protons, neutrons, positrons, neutrinos, mesons, and hyperons. Electrons are particles that carry a tiny negative charge of electricity. The proton, about 1,836 times as heavy as the electron, carries a positive charge of electricity. The neutron, still heavier, carries no electric charge at all. The positron, about the size of the electron, carries a positive charge. The neutrino, about one two- thousandth the size of the electron, has no charge.
