Questioning Atoms
through Inference
Janet Kuypers
10/30/14
Whenever you start teaching a class like this,
you say,
“We never measure an object,
we measure the properties of an object.”
Because when it comes to learning some things,
we can only guess,
when there’s only so much research we can do,
and that’s when everything’s a guessing game.
#
Remember chemistry class, learning about
atoms
and seeing rings of “shells” of electrons
surrounding protons and neutrons in a nucleus?
Well, I dare you to actually look inside
of an atom,
because no one has ever done it. When chemists
zoom in close enough, the see the atom
as a fuzzy spot, and that’s all. Just a spot.
Nothing else.
So how do they know what is inside of the atom,
and how do they know how an atom looks?
#
People probably remember chemistry class
as a boring
memorization of stats (that they can’t
for the life of them remember anymore).
And that’s the funny thing about testing
the limits
of science, because when you’ve witnessed
as much as you can about things, it’s time
to start theorizing. And when it comes to
the atom,
yes, a lot of it’s based on science, of course,
but some of it is expanding your mind
to beyond what you can physically see
to learn
what makes everything ... everything,
and how everything actually works.
#
In the 1800s, English chemist John Dalton
found matter
was actually made of “lumpy particles”
(those were the atoms), but almost a century
later the English physicist J.J. Thomson
discovered
the electron (don’t ask me how he
discovered it, they don’t explain that in
“History of the Atom 101”). He postulated
there was
positive energy in these atoms, and there
were also negative energy particles. But then,
by 1900 Max Planck was vibrating atoms,
heating them
’til they glowed, and that’s how they first
measured the energy from these particles.
By 1912 Danish physicists Neils Bohr
Said,
“Here’s some rules that seem impossible,
but they describe the way atoms operate,
so let’s pretend they’re correct and
use them.”
So he explained orbital shells of electrons.
And really, this is how it happened.
#
So, while I was sitting at a bar at the
Notre Dame Campus,
I asked a science-geek history buff
If anyone has actually seen inside an atom.
And he said, now, when I talk like this,
I say,
“We never measure an object,
we measure the properties of an object.”
So, it seems that we never actually see
inside an atom,
but we can guess what it’s like by the way
it reacts when we mess with it enough.
Fascinating. That sounds kind of like
some relationships
I’ve had in the past. Potentially messy,
but really intriguing when you think
you finally figured it all out.
| 
