What is meant by the structure of the atom?
The ancient Greeks thought about atoms more than 2,000 years ago. They were puzzled by the changes in nature and tried to explain them with one of the logical theories. Everything, they reasoned, must be made of tiny atoms that form various materials as they arrange and rearrange themselves. The logical thinkers of Greece reasoned that the atom is the smallest possible piece of matter and that the atom cannot be divided into anything smaller than itself. This idea prevailed for centuries, right up to the Age of Science. Then the atom was found to be a unit of still smaller particles of matter. What’s more, as atomic particles were discovered one by one, the atom was found to be a very orderly unit of matter. When we refer to the structure of the atom, we mean the orderly fashion in which it is built, the neat way in which its assorted particles are arranged and held together. Scientists have identified more than a hundred different atoms, each one a different size and having a differen
