Marcus Chown - Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You: A Guide to the Universe

H OW WE DISCOVERED THAT EVERYTHING IS MADE OF ATOMS AND THAT ATOMS ARE MOSTLY EMPTY SPACE

A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of anelephants trunk.

Jostein Gaarder

We never had any intention of using the weapon. But they were such aterribly troublesome race. They insisted on seeing us as the enemy despiteall our efforts at reassurance. When they fired their entire nuclearstockpile at our ship, orbiting high above their blue planet, our patiencesimply ran out.

The weapon was simple but effective. It squeezed out all the emptyspace from matter.

As the commander of our Sirian expedition examined the shimmeringmetallic cube, barely 1 centimetre across, he shook his primaryhead despairingly. Hard to believe that this was all that was left of thehuman race!

If the idea of the entire human race fitting into the volume of a sugar cube sounds like science fiction, think again. It is a remarkable fact that 99.9999999999999 per cent of the volume of ordinary matter is empty space. If there were some way to squeeze all the empty space out of the atoms in our bodies, humanity would indeed fit into the space occupied by a sugar cube.

The appalling emptiness of atoms is only one of the extraordinary characteristics of the building blocks of matter. Another, of course, is their size. It would take 10 million atoms laid end to end to span the width of a single full stop on this page, which raises the question, how did we ever discover that everything is made of atoms in the first place?

The idea that everything is made of atoms was actually first suggested by the Greek philosopher Democritus in about 440 BC. Picking up a rockor it may have been a branch or a clay pothe asked himself the question: If I cut this in half, then in half again, can I go on cutting it in half forever? His answer was an emphatic no. It was inconceivable to him that matter could be subdivided forever. Sooner or later, he reasoned, a tiny grain of matter would be reached that could be cut no smaller. Since the Greek for uncuttable was a-tomos, Democritus called the hypothetical building blocks of all matter atoms.

Since atoms were too small to be seen with the senses, finding evidence for them was always going to be difficult. Nevertheless, a way was found by the 18th-century Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli. Bernoulli realised that, although atoms were impossible to observe directly, it might still be possible to observe them indirectly. In particular, he reasoned that if a large enough number of atoms acted together, they might have a big enough effect to be obvious in the everyday world. All he needed was to find a place in nature where this happened. He found onein a gas.

Bernoulli imagined a gas like air or steam as a collection of billions upon billions of atoms in perpetual frenzied motion like a swarm of angry bees. This vivid picture immediately suggested an explanation for the pressure of a gas, which kept a balloon inflated or pushed against the piston of a steam engine. When confined in any container, the atoms of a gas would drum relentlessly on the walls like hailstones on a tin roof. Their combined effect would be to create a jittery force that, to our coarse senses, would seem like a constant force pushing back the walls.

But Bernoullis microscopic explanation of pressure provided more than a convenient mental picture of what was going on in a gas. Crucially, it led to a specific prediction. If a gas were squeezed into half its original volume, the gas atoms would need to fly only half as far between collisions with the container walls. They would therefore collide twice as frequently with those walls, doubling the pressure. And if the gas were squeezed into a third of its volume, the atoms would collide three times as frequently, trebling the pressure. And so on.