Have you ever looked at something and wondered what it was made out of? Why should you? Well it might be a nice fact to know to impress your neighbours or perhaps your friends or even the butcher. Then again it might just be interesting.
Everybody learns about molecules and atoms at school and in high school about quarks perhaps. Let us start at baby level and then work our way up to almost science level whatever that is.
Molecules are small particles that make up all living and non-living things. They are made up of even tinier particles called atoms. Moving things are made from only about 25 of more than 100 known atoms in the universe. Molecules are made from as few as two atoms to hundreds of millions of atoms.
Flu Molecule
Molecules are so small that there are more molecules in your body than there are stars in the universe! ( no I didn’t count them).
What’s so special about molecules in your body and in other living things? Each molecule has a unique shape that allows it to interact with other molecules. The interactions, getting together, between molecules let us as well as bacteria, elephants, and other living things move, sense, reproduce and do the things that keep all living creatures alive.
So if a molecule is made up of atoms then what are they? (Do you really want to know?) A typical atom consists of a nucleus composed of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons surrounded by a cloud of orbiting negatively charged electrons. The proton is located in the center (or nucleus) of an atom, each atom has at least one proton. The neutron is locatated in the atomic nucleus ( and why not?). The electron is a very small particle located outside the nucleus. Because they move at speeds near the speed of light the precise location of electrons is hard to pin down.
So what is this quark thing? Quarks are a type of particle that make up matter. Look around you…all of the matter that you see is made up of
A Molecule
protons and neutrons, and these particles are composed of quarks. Quarks and Leptons are the building blocks which build up matter, i.e., they are seen as the “elementary particles”
In the present standard model, there are six “flavors” of quarks-
Up (symbol: u), down (d), charm(c), strange (s), top (t) and bottom (b).
Up and down quarks have the lowest masses of all quarks, and thus are generally stable and very common in the universe. The other quarks are much more massive, and will rapidly decay into the lighter up and down quarks. Because of this, the heavier charm, strange, top and bottom quarks can only be produced in high energy collisions, such as in particle accelerators and cosmic rays.
Every quark has an opposite called antimatter. Almost the entire universe is full of matter and this is a great mystery as antimatter doesn’t seem to exist when it should exist. A good website about antimatter if you are interested is here.
For many months, the GEO600 (a laser interferometer, whatever that is?)team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it.
GEO600 stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. or like the pixels on your screen that make up this post.
Well thats about as low as we go in this post as the small stuff as it gets smaller now gets truly wacky. The Planck length, for instance, is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time just stop being valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the ‘quantum of length’, the smallest measurement of length with any meaning.
Watch this space for the next thrilling episode of small, very small and really, really small stuff.
I thought everything was made from CARBON.
Nice Post! I thought we was made from amino acid
Taken from Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_atom
Carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is present in all known lifeforms, and in the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.[8] This abundance, together with the unique diversity of organic compounds and their unusual polymer-forming ability at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, make this element the chemical basis of all known life.
Just for interest I posted the elements and the amount of each in the forum.
Good old hydrogen and helium are the main men.
But are helium and hydrogen in every living thing?
To form a carbon atom the raw materials are helium atoms. But by the time helium had formed in the big bang, the universe had expanded to the point where its temperature, density, and pressure were all too low for helium to fuse into carbon. Fusion reactions using carbon as the raw material to make even heavier elements of course don’t even have a chance if the carbon never formed. The 88 elements too heavy to have been formed during the initial big bang, including those needed for life, formed later in stars. So we are recycled stardust.
Thanks for the question.
I love knowing that we are recycled! Kinda makes you believe in reincarnation.
And to be “stardust” is just too beautiful. No wonder I feel an affinity to the stars!
I took the liberty of sending this website to an old chemist friend — organic type. He’s been out of the “business” for several years, but his response was interesting:
“I thought I knew most of that, but the business about quarks was barely familiar. I wish these science writers would stop telling people that electrons go around the nucleus in circles, etc. As I understand it, that’s an old idea and quantum mechanics – the more recent way to understand electrons – describes electrons as inhabiting ‘orbitals’ which are probability volumes calculated by those who know how. It’s all higher, and I mean really higher, mathematics, thus hard for us peons to understand. Now, you know as much as I ever did.”
We didn’t have quantum chemistry in our dept. during his tenure. As with everything, science progresses in leaps and bounds and is almost impossible to stay abreast of unless it involves your own particular discipline.
Thought his comments were interesting and deserved feedback.
-v
Thanks very much for your comment. I am only a retired airline pilot and write on this blog as a hobby, (perhaps I should write an about page) but I do try to get things right. I am really trying to keep things simple but you are definitely right!
Anyway I looked around on the Internet for a reliable source on quantum molecules and think I’ve found something taken from Microsoft Encarta, I hope it’s not out of date
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761567432_4/atom.html
Because of the electron’s wave-particle duality, physicists cannot define an electron’s exact location in an atom. If the electron were just a particle, measuring its location would be relatively simple. As soon as physicists try to measure its location, however, the electron’s wavelike nature becomes apparent, and they cannot pinpoint an exact location. Instead, physicists calculate the probability that the electron is located in a certain place. Adding up all these probabilities, physicists can produce a picture of the electron that resembles a fuzzy cloud around the nucleus. The densest part of this cloud represents the place where the electron is most likely to be located.
You notice I have written a little article on the basics of quantum theory and if you want to give feedback I will be more than willing to hear it. In fact if you would like to write any articles I would be more than willing to publish them.
Glad I stumbled into this article! Finally, got what I was looking for to put on my school report
Where does God come into play?
I would imagine if there was a God, he or she would come into play where ever the heck they wanted to.
This is a very good post, but I was wondering how do I suscribe to the RSS feed?
I seen this blog when I was doing a Google search. Thanks for the good read, I look forward to reading more in the future.