Kind: captions
Language: en
So, what's an atom?
An atom is um Oh, man. Something that
builds up everything.
Atom. Oh, that one. Um the small
particle, isn't it?
Atom. That's a very small um particle.
An atom is the smallest indivisible part
of a of an element. Can further divide
an atom into protons and neutrons.
Protons and neutrons. Is that it? It's
just a small little thing that's made up
of protons, electrons, and a neutron.
All of the materials and and things are
made up of of atoms. And then you've got
the the nucleus and the electrons that
go around the outside. That will be an
atom, which is made up of the nucleus
and electrons. There can be dozens of
these electrons whizzing around in
different scale, different orbits. And
it's mainly mainly nothing.
This is how it's represented.
Yep.
There's the proton and that's the
electron. And then you have a neutron in
there as well. And this thing spins
around. But
so it seems most people are comfortable
with the idea that all matter is made up
of atoms. That an atom is the
fundamental building block of matter.
And that these atoms are made up of
smaller particles called protons,
electrons, and neutrons. But after that,
the details get a little bit hazy.
It looks a bit like Saturn. [laughter]
It does. It looks very much like Saturn.
So what I'd like to do is actually build
an atom, or at least a model of an atom.
So I've got here uh proton, neutron, and
electron. The simplest atom that I can
make is hydrogen because hydrogen
consists of only two particles, a little
positive proton and a tiny little
negative electron. They're attracted to
each other because of their opposite
charge. And so many people think of the
electron as orbiting about the proton.
That's not strictly true. I mean, it's
not like a planet going around the sun,
but because the proton is positively
charged and the electron is negatively
charged, they're both attracted towards
each other. Now, what would happen if we
took our hydrogen atom, which consists
just of a proton and an electron, and we
added a neutron into the nucleus?
This hasn't really changed anything
electrically because the proton and the
electron are still opposite charges and
attracting each other, and the neutron
is neutral. So it doesn't really affect
this interaction. So the atom that we
have here is still hydrogen except it's
just a little bit more massive. You
could say it's heavier because the
neutron is there. But um how does that
really affect the behavior of u this
atom? Well, the truth is it's not that
different to regular hydrogen.
And this is what we call an isotope. An
isotope is a different version of the
same element. So it has the same number
of protons in the nucleus but just a
different number of neutrons.