EIN AND ively unraveling tructure ling to uand someto    in its as remote: tiny and ever- mysterious atom.

        t Caltec Ric if you o reducestific ory to one important statement it oms.” titute every t is all atoms. Not just tables and sofas, but t you really ot ceive.

        t of atoms is tin for “little mass”).

        A molecule is simply toms ogetablearra: add toms of o one of oxygen and you er.

        Cs tend to terms of molecules rats in mucers tend to terms of    letters, so it is molecules t, and to say t. At sea level, at a temperature of 32 degrees Fa, onecubitimeter of air (t is, a space about tain 45 billionbillion molecules. And timeter you see around you. timeters tside your ake to fill t vie ake to build a universe.

        Atoms, in s, are very abundant.

        tastically durable. Because toms really get around.

        Every atom you possess    certainly passed tars and been part ofmillions anisms on its o being you. e are eaically numerous andso vigorously recycled at deat a signifit number of our atoms—up to a billion foreac ed—probably once beloo Sorical figureyou care to o be orical, apparently, as it takes tomssome decades to bee tributed; , you arenot yet one ions—t-lived ones. oms o find neoms, ically forever. Nobody actually kno acc to Marti is probably about 1035years—a numberso big t even I am o express it in notation.

        Above all, atoms are tiiny indeed. osom is essentiallyimpossible to imagine, but ry.

        Start er, o athe scale of micranisms.

        A typical paramecium, for instance, is about ters, o see er, you il it y feet across.

        ed to see toms in to make teen miles across.

        Atoms, in ot on a scale of minuteness of anotogeto getdoo toms, you o take eato ten t’s tom: oen-millionter. It is a degree of slenderness y of our imaginations, but you get some idea of tions if you bear in mind t oom is to ter line as t of paper is to t of tateBuilding.

        It is of course treme durability of atoms t makes ti makes to deted uand. tion t atomsare tically iructible—and t all t occurred not to Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, as you mig, or evento    rato a spare and liged Englison, ered in ter on cry.

        Dalton riear Cockermouto a family ofpoor but devout Quaker er t illiam ords Cockermoutionally brigudent—so very brig at t Dalton’s precocity, but per:    about time on’s Principia in tin and oture. At fifteen, stillsg, ook a job i o Mancer, scarcely stirring from ty years of er ellectual ey to grammar. Color blindness, a dition from onism because of udies. But it em of C establisation.

        t cer of just five pages (out of t entered atoms in sometion. Dalton’s simple insig at t of all matter are exceedingly tiny,irreducible particles. “e migtempt to introduce a o tem or annie one already ience, as to create or destroy a particle of hydrogen,”

        e.

        oms nor term itself ly ne Greeks. Dalton’s tribution o sider tive sizes and cers oftoms and    togeta estelement, so    an atomic er sisted of sevenparts of oxygen to one of omic    tive erribly accurate—oxygen’s atomi, not seven—but try and muodern sce.

        ton famous—albeit in a lo P .J. Pelletier traveled to Mao meet tomic ierexpected to find tae grand institution, so ouo discover eacary aritic to boys in a small screet. Acc to tific orian E. J. ier, upon be man,stammered:

        “Est-ce que j’ai l’on?” for    t of European fame, teac four rules. “Yes,” said tter-of-fact Quaker. “ilt t do t about ic?”

        Alton tried to avoid all ed to ty against    pension. y tege stretary of National Biograp, rivaled ieentury men of sce.

        For a tury after Dalton made    remaiirely ical, and a fe stists—notably t Ernst Maced tence of atoms at all. “Atoms ot be perceived by the senses . .

        . t,” e. tence of atoms fully icular t it o    in t tical p, and atomit, Ludzmann in 1906.

        It ein rovertible evidence of atoms’ existence ion in 1905, but ttracted little attention and in any caseEinstein o bee ed ivity. So t realomic age, if not t personage on t Rutherford.

        Ruto parents land to raise a little flax and a lot of co parapeveneinberg). Groe part of a remote try,    as far from tream of sce as it o be, but in 1895    took o tory at Cambridge Uy, o bee ttestpla to do physics.

        Ps are notoriously sful of stists from ot Austrian p olfgang Pauli left , aggered aken a bullfigood,” o afriend. “But a c . . .”

        It ood. “All sce is eitampcolleg,”    imes siainengaging irony t physics.

        Ruto be a genius, but even luckier to live at a time ing and so patible (imentsnotanding). Never again e so fortably overlap.

        For all    an especially brilliant man and ually prettyterrible at matics. Often duriures    so lost in ioudents to    out for themselves.

        Acc to ime colleague James , even particularly clever at experimentation. enacious and open-minded. Forbrilliauted sing out toiers, as far as    deal furt oted ractable problem, o    it    people and to be more receptive tounortio breakto spendimmeedious ting at a s ting alpicle stillations, as t of    o see—possibly t—t t in tom could, if o “make this old world vanish in smoke.”

        P made timid sold t Rut to make a radio broadcast across tlantic, a colleague drilyasked: “ of good-natured fidence. o    o be at t of a    I?” C. P. Snoy.”

        But botc thedish.

        1It ful period in sce. In tgen discovered X rays at ty of ürzburg in Germany,and t year ivity. And tself    to embark on a long period of greatness. In 1897, J. J. tron t. R. ilson    particle detectortron there.

        Furtill in ture, James atson and Francis Crick ructure ofDNA at the dish in 1953.

        In tin—o transmit a crisp signal more t for time—but gave it up le future.

        On t t ter took a post at McGill Uy in Montreal, and teady rise to greatness. By time igations into tegration of ts, and try of radioactivesubstances,” acc to tation) o Mancer Uy,and it , t    important ermining tructure and nature of tom.

        1ted mati and steel baron in Victland. In 1870, y ￡6,300 to build an experimental lab.

        By tietury it    atoms s—tron ablis—but it    kno toget sook. Some ps t t atomsmigogetly    any edspace. t an atom    bun or aplum pudding: a dense, solid object t carried a positive c t udded ively s, like ts in a currant bun.

        In 1910, Ruted by udent er iioor t bears oms, or alpicles, at as of gold foil.

        2to Rutonis, some of ticles bounced back. It    rebounded into his lap.

        t not supposed to er siderable refle ion: ticles t bounced back riking somet t of tom, om, Rutly empty space,    ter.

        t gratifying discovery, but it presented one immediate problem. By all tional poms s t.

        Let us pause for a moment and sider tructure of tom as    noom is made from tary particles: protons, rical s, rical s, rons are packed into trons spin aroundoutside. tons is om its city. An atom on is an atom of ons is ons is litime you add a proton you get a ne. (Because tons in an atom is alrons, you imes see it ten t it is trons t defines a; it es tot o me is t protons give an atom its identity,eles its personality.)rons don’t influen atom’s identity, but to its mass. trons is generally about tons, but tly. Add a ron or t an isotope. terms you odating teco isotopes—carbon-14, for instance, ons and eigrons (teen being two).

        rons and protons occupy tom’s nucleus. tom is tiny—only onemilliontom—but fantastically dense, sitains virtually all tom’s mass. As Cropper    it, if an atom o t t a fly manytimes    ed roomi g his head in 1910.

        It is still a fairly astounding notion to sider t atoms are mostly empty space, and tty s e togeter bee a loyal Nazi, unatingly betraying Jewish colleagues, including many whohad helped him.

        real    often used for illustration—t actually strike eacimotively c for trical    a c actually sitting tlevitating above it at a    of one angstrom (a imeter), youreles and its eles implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

        ture t nearly everybody om is of aron or ts orbiting a sun. ted in 1904, based on littlemore t named aro Nagaoka. It ispletely    durable just to    inspiredgeions of sce fi ers to create stories of omsbee tiny ined solar systems or our solar system turns out to be merely a mote in somemu for Nuclear Researcs e. In fact, as ps o realize, elesare not like orbiting plas at all, but more like to fillevery bit of spa ts simultaneously (but    to be everyrons are ).

        Needless to say, very little of tood in 1910 or for many years afterward.

        Ruted some large and immediate problems, not least t ronso orbit a nucleus    crasiorodynamic t a flyiron s of energy—in only an instant orso—and spiral into trous sequences for botons ive coget blo of tom apart. Clearly    governed by t applied in tations reside.

        As ps began to delve into tomic realm, t it    merelydifferent from anyt different from anytomic be isvery difficult to get used to and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone, boto to t.”    ent, ps ury to adjust teness of atomic be must    to Rut was all brand new.

        One of tructure of tom, Boing t poned o e    see anytom, to try to    its structurefrom    beo it, as Ruticles at foil. Sometimes, not surprisingly, ts of ts were puzzling.

        One puzzle t ime o do rum readings of tterns s oms emittedenergy at certain    not ot    turning up at particular locations but raveliand whis should be.

        It ion and dasitutions of Atoms and Molecules,” trons could keep from falling into ting t tain s. Acc to tron movis antaneously in anot visiting tum leap”—is of course utterly strange, but itoo good not to be true. It not only kept eles from spiraling catastropo t also explained rons only appearediain orbits because ted iain orbits. It ein received his.

        Mean Cambridge as J. J. tory, came up    explained    be offset by some type of ralizing particles,    not easy to prove. Rute, James Ced eleven intensive years to ing for rons beforefinally succeeding in 1932. oo,    out in tory of t, tery of tron ial to t of tomib. (Because rons    repelled by trical fields att of an atom and tiny torpedoes into an atomiucleus, settingoff tructive process knoed i is “very likely tomib edly by the Germans.”

        As it rying to uand trange beron. t tron sometimes beicle and sometimes like a y drove ps nearly mad. Fort decade all across Europe t and scribbled and offered petingor de Broglie, tcertain anomalies in trons disappeared whem as waves.

        tioed ttention of trian Ers and devised a em called    time t erner ing trixmecically plex t ood it,including    even knorix is ,” o a friend at one point), but it did seem to solve certain problems t Sco explain. t is t ping premises,t produced ts. It uation.

        Finally, in 1926, ed promise, produg a ne came to be knoum mec t of it y Principle, es t tron is a particle but a particle t    bedescribed in terms of ainty around    ron takes as it moves t is at agiven instant, but    knoh.

        3Any attempt to measure ole uainty about tainty in regard to ero es t several -ranslators, but t none quite equates to tainty.

        Frayn suggests t ierminacy ter erminability terstill.

        disturb t a matter of simply needing more precise instruments; it is animmutable property of the universe.

        tice is t you ever predict    anygiven moment. You    only list its probability of being t it, aro exist until it is observed. Or, put sligly, until it isobserved aron must be regarded as being “at once everywhere and nowhere.”

        If take some fort in kno it ops, too. Overbye notes: “Boed t a persed onfirst    quantum t uand    try.”

        So tom turned out to be quite u most people ed. tro fly around t around its sun, but iakes on t of a cloud. tom isn’t some rations sometimes ence us to suppose, but simply termost of tron clouds. tself is essentially just a zone of statistical probability marking tron only very seldom strays. tom, if you could see it,ennis ball tallic sp not mucer all, dealing    from the one we see around us).

        It seemed as if trangeness. For t time, as James trefil    it,stists ered “an area of t our brains just aren’t ouand.” Or as Feynman expressed it, “ts delved deeper, tonly could eles jump from one orbit to anot traveling across any interveningspace, but matter could pop ience from not all—“provided,” in tman of MIt, “it disappears again    e.”

        Per arresting of quantum improbabilities is t tomic particles iain pairs, even    siderable distances,    eatly “knoicles y knoo quantum tyou determiicle, its sister particle, no matter ant aely begin spinning in te dire and at te.

        It is as if, in ter Laical poolballs, one in Oant you sent one spinning tely spin in a trary dire at precisely ts at ty of Geneva sent ponsseven miles in opposite dires and demonstrated t interfering antaneous response in ther.

        tc at one ference Bo tion     rate tuitive nature of tum in    om of a radioactive substaaco a vial of icle degraded    riggera mec . If not, t     kno tard t as 100 pert alive and 100 pert dead at time. tepoudable excitement, t one ot “predictfuture evely if one ot even measure t state of the universe precisely!”

        Because of its oddities, many ps disliked quantum t least certain aspectsof it, and none more so tein. ttle ironice it imes like ion at t of tum tely, but    like it. “God doesn’t play dice,” he said.

        4Einstein couldn’t bear tion t God could create a universe in    a dista one particle couldinstantaneously influenotrillions of miles aark violation of tivity. t notrace t a s insisting t, some tomic level, information could.

        (No one, ially, icles ac. Stists    o t Yakir A tit.”)Above all, t quantum produced a level of untidi previously existed. Suddenly you s of lao explain tum tivity for ty of relativity t at explaining ed suns or o cluster, but turned out to    all at ticle level. to explain    atoms t nuclear ford rong fords atoms toget’s ons to bed doogetasks, mostly to do rolling tes of certainsorts of radioactive decay.

        te its name, is ten billion billion billion times stroy, and trong nuclear force is more poill—vastly so, in fact—but tends to only ti distarong force realy toabout 1/100,000 of ter of an atom. t’s edand dense ao be so unstable: trong forcejust ’t o all tons.

        t of all t p large—leading quite separate lives. Einstein dislikedt, too. ed t of o searco tie up time to time    , butit alle pitied. Almost    exception, e Snoill t ed the sed half of his life.”

        4Or at least t is    is nearly alual quote    seems o sneak a look atGod’s cards. But t elepat I ot believe for asingle moment.”

        Elses    om at aremely profound level—as too effectively demonstrated in August 1945 by exploding a pair of atomibs over Japan.

        By t ps could be excused for t t about queredtom. In fact, everyticle p to get a ed. But before ake up t sliging story,    bring anotrao date by sidering an important and salutary tale of avarice, deceit,bad sce, several needless deatermination of th.
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