Q&A : WHAT IS AN ATOM AND HOW DO WE KNOW?

WHAT IS AN ATOM AND HOW DO WE KNOW?

1,773,202 views

Sep 19, 2018

Stated Clearly

435K subscribers

 

Ever wonder how we actually know that atoms exist? Here we'll learn what atoms are and exactly how scientists went about figuring all this out.

 

Play the Bond Breaker game here: http://www.castl.uci.edu/games/bondbr...

 

Note about the Nitrogen atom Image:

The nitrogen paper was supposed to be published along with this animation but the journal decided the nitrogen paper was too redundant. They already published the same imaging technique with an Ag atom back in 2017. Long stroy short: The only place to see the nitrogen atom is in this animation. That said, if you want to see an Ag atom imaged using the same technique, see this paper here:  https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsn...

 

Each pixel in the image represents a reading from the scanning probe. The colors show us how high that particular part of the atom's electron cloud is compared to the substrate it's sitting on. Red is highest, blue is lowest. We are only seeing the outline of the electron cloud, not the nucleus.

 

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Correction: In this video I state that Jabir ibn Hayyan was Arabian, but there is uncertainty about this among historians. He may have been Persian. Like many influential people of his time, his story is almost mythical, with multiple origins being found in historical writings.

 

Also, he never used a Bunsen burner (which is what I drew him using) that wasn't invented until 1856. Jabir likely burnt wood or other solid fuels to heat his reactions.

 

Arabic Subtitles by Ammar Abu-Shukur and Mohammed Baset

 

#chemistry #atom #theory #science

 

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