The only real contribution we can make beyond what the kids are getting in school is to give a hint that there's something weirdly mysterious about the world at that level, and that maybe someday they can understand it.Īt any rate a BB and a cotton ball are not such exotic materials.Īnd no, I didn't learn the Bohr atom, but maybe it is useful for some kids.Īs the mother of a middle school student who likes science, I agree with Mike regarding the futility of building models of atoms. We don't have anything to add to that, and we don't want to use a site which some people treat as a reference source to be saying that's accurate.

Almost all the students have seen the toy pictures of atoms with little dots whizzing around. Here's our rationale for emphasizing the mystery. The 'atom picture' questions fall in between. We're unwilling to give classical explanations for why some materials are magnetic since one literally cannot even start to say anything meaningful without quantum mechanics. We're happy to give Newtonian answers to mechanics questions where relativistic effects can be neglected. It's often a tough call to decide when it's ok to present a falsely simplified answer. Yeah, as you can see we heard similar complaints from some others. We love to give simple explanations and pictures when it's possible, but when it's not maybe it's best just to tell students that to understand some mysteries they have to continue their educations. That was a big puzzle before the discovery of the quantum laws that describe small things. If you were to imagine that the electrons were little classical particles in orbit, they would radiate electromagnetic waves, losing energy, and the atom would collapse in about a billionth of a second. If the orbital velocity were too small (say zero, for example), the planet would fall into the Sun.

That's not a possibility for planetary motion. That's true of the electrons in hydrogen, helium, and some of the electrons in other elements. Then there is some indefinite velocity, but it's radial, i.e. The electrons in atoms are not in particular places and do not have particular orbital velocities, except when the orbital velocity is exactly zero. For example, a planet circling the Sun is at a particular place and has a particular orbital velocity. However, at least as much would be false. It's true that students could do that, and some of what it would convey about atoms would be true. You can click on any element to find information about it, and the atomic numbers are listed on the table itself, so they're easy to find.Īs for what to build your atom out of, be creative! So far, scientists have discovered elements with atomic numbers of even more than 100! For more information on different elements, check out this. Some other elements are Helium (2), Lithium (3), Beryllium (4), Boron (5), Carbon (6), Nitrogen (7), and Oxygen (8). For example, Hydrogen has one proton so its atomic number is 1. The number of protons that an atom has is called its atomic number. A normal gold atom, for example, has 79 protons and 118 neutrons.Īn interesting fact is that although the 'cloud' of electrons that surround the nucleus is much much much bigger than the nucleus itself, most of the mass of the atom (more than 99%) is due to the nucleus. Atoms also tend to have similar numbers of neutrons and protons, though the trend is for heavier atoms to have have more neutrons than protons. If a neutral atom loses or gains some electrons it is called an ion. Neutral atoms have the same number of protons and electrons. You can use different colors to show which are neutrons, protons, or electrons. Neutrons and protons are about the same size, and electrons are much much much smaller. Cool project! The basic structure of an atom is that it has little things called neutrons and protons that are stuck together in a ball (called a nucleus) in the middle, with electrons in a bigger fuzzy ball around that.

Build an atom