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An Article about Particles
by Andreas Bohnker

Particles are interesting. We could write articles about particles. But they're complicated. To understand particles you have to use your smarticles.
 
Particles are small. Molecules are really small. Atoms are really really tiny. I mean, atoms are so mind-bogglingly tiny! If you had one atom, you'd never be able to find it among all the quintillions of other atoms.
 
In fact, let's suppose you threw a potluck party and everybody in the whole world came. That's 6.2 billion people. And let's suppose they each brought one atom. That's still not enough atoms to make a casserole. In fact, if you put them all together in one lump, it would still be far too small to see.
 
In fact, suppose everybody in the whole world threw a potluck party, and everybody went to each of them, bringing one atom each time, and you accumulated all those atoms from the 6.2 billion potluck parties -- that's like 38 billion billion atoms -- and let's suppose they were carbon atoms, because those are nice and black and easy to spot in a glass casserole dish. How big a lump would we have?
 
Well, we can calculate its mass. Avogadro's number (the number of atoms in one "mole") is 6.0221367 x 10^23, or 602,213,670,000,000,000,000,000, approximately. A mole in this case is not the animal, but the ratio of atomic weight to grams of a substance. A carbon atom has an atomic weight of 12, and we have 38,440,000,000,000,000,000 of them. So the weight of our lump of carbon is 38,440,000,000,000,000,000 times 12 = 461,280,000,000,000,000,000 atomic mass units. Divide by Avogadro's number to get the mass in grams: 0.000766 grams. Let's be generous and round that up to 1 milligram.
 
I'm tired of doing the math so I went to the density conversion webpage at http://www.allmeasures.com/Formulae/static/materials/113/density.htm
to find out how big a piece of carbon 1 mg is. It turns out to be 0.441 cubic millimeter.  Out of all those atoms you could make a tiny cube about .75 mm on a side -- a little less than the thickness of a penny.  So you could see it all right, but if you don't watch it carefully it could very easily blow away, and all that work would be for nothing.




The illustration shows a cube,
a little less than the thickness of a penny,
 pictured with a penny for good measure.