What is meant boy atom?
Answers
Atoms are the main building blocks of matter. All the materials are made up of very small particles called atoms. For example chair, water, air, plants and humans etc.
riginally Answered: What meant by an atom?
Everything around us is made up of atoms.
ATOM
The word ‘atom’ is derived from a Greek word ‘a-tomio’(means - indivisible).
Very often you may have heard that atoms are the building blocks of all matter. But what does it mean?
It means that matter is composed of tiny particles known as Atoms. These atoms are so small that we cannot see them even with a high-powered microscope. The number of atoms present even in a small amount of matter is very large. Atoms are the most fundamental of all particles that can have an independent existence. An atom is the smallest particle of an element that retains the identity of the element.
SUB-ATOMIC PARTICLES
Subatomic particles are particles that are smaller than the atom.
ELECTRON
In 1897, a British physicist Joseph John Thomson demonstrated on the basis of the experiments that negatively charged particles are present in the atoms. Initially, Thomson thought that the negative particles would be different for each element. But after carrying out experiments with many different materials, he found that the negatively charged particles from all the materials were always identical . He concluded that same type of negatively charged particles are present in the atoms of all the elements .These particles had a very small mass and are now called ELECTRONS.Electrons were the first sub-atomic particles discovered and studied. An electron is represented as ‘e’ . The mass of an electron is considered to be negligible and its charge is considered as to be one unit negative.
2. PROTON
The term proton itself seems to have been coined by Rutherford in 1920.
Its mass is approximately 1836 times greater than that of the electron . It is represented as ‘p+’ and its charge is taken as one unit positive.
3. NEUTRON
In 1932, James Chadwick discovered yet another sub -atomic particle which had no charge and had a mass nearly equal to that of a proton . It is eventually named as NEUTRON . In general, a neutron is represented as ‘n⁰’.
