JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
[Still from the IBM 2013 video “A Boy and His Atom”, where a team manipulated carbon monoxide atoms on a 45×25 nanometer frame. Just for reference a human hair is 105 nm, and there are 24×109 nanometers to the inch. Small.]
I was looking around, trying to figure out a chronology of small, of how small things can really be, when I decided to check out the basic terms of conversation in the Oxford English Dictionary. I was surprised to see that the first reference to “sub-atomic” was much earlier than I expected, finding a place in the five-year-old science journal Nature, in 1874. Just for the sake of it I’ve made a list of the atomic-related words that came to mind, just to see how they were entering relatively common usage in English. And so, below: sub-atomic, inter-atomic, atom, split the atom, proton, electron, and neutron.