Quantum Physics for Beginners: Discover How The Quantum Physics Phenomena Influence Your World In a Easy and Intuitive Way With No Hard Math. by Smith Eugene

Author:Smith, Eugene [Smith, Eugene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The Building Blocks of Matter and Wave-Particle Duality

One of the big all-time questions is, 'What are things made of?' Most of the answers have come down on the side of having a set of basic building blocks to make it all. This was initially studied by philosophers, then by alchemists and then by chemists. It took the physicists to figure this out!

I'm very sure you've heard of one of the first models we know about. Everything was made of a combination of four elements—earth, air, fire and water. This had the advantage of having only a few building blocks and had connections between properties and contents.

The next major model was the chemist Mendeleev’s periodic table. All matter consisted of atoms, with one type of atom per element (e.g. iron, oxygen). Over 100 elements have been identified—a huge number to be simple building blocks!

Take a piece of gold with you. Keep cutting it down into smaller pieces. Every lump is always going to be gold. Finally, it was assumed that you might get to the stage where you couldn't cut it any more. The ancient Greek word 'atomos' (meaning 'uncut') has been used to refer to such small lumps of an element. The word means 'indivisible'—the small lumps were thought to be fundamental.

However, physicists have discovered that electrons have come from within atoms. That meant that the atoms had to be made of something else. The hunt was going on. Rutherford studied the Plum Pudding System of JJ Thompson in the early 20th century. This held that the negative electrons had been held in a positive 'batter.' He set some of his students, Geiger and Marsden, to test it.

Some things we're happy to call stuff; tables, chairs, squirrels. Some of the things we're happy to call waves; sound, water ripples, Mexicans. Some things, however, have led to long arguments about what they are. Light is a very important example. Back at the end of the 17th century, Newton assumed that light was made up of tiny particles (he called them corpuscles) and so was matter. Huygens assumed that the light was waves. At that time, Huygens won the debate with a series of experiments showing how light actually behaved like a wave; it could spread through a gap (diffract). The matter seemed resolved before we started to be able to study the sub-atomic world.

In 1905, Einstein published a paper on a dark phenomenon called 'photoelectric effect.' It was observed that when light shone on some of the metals charged, they lost their charge. It wasn't all metals, however, or all light forms. Zinc, for example, maintains its charge when white light shines on it but loses it when ultraviolet light (the kind used in tanning booths) shines on it. This could not be clarified if the light was a wave. Einstein realized that this was evidence that Newton was correct and that the light was actually made of particles. He named them the 'quantum of light' or the 'photons.' A branch of physics called quantum mechanics has been born.

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