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 45x25 nanometer frame. Just for reference a human hair is 105 nm, and there are 24x109 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.
Sub-atomic:
Occurring in the atom; smaller than the atom. Also: concerned with or involving particles, forces, or phenomena on this scale.
1874 Nature 26 Mar. 414/1 In the case of many of the metalloids we get, between these extremes, a channelled space spectrum. Let us term this the sub-atomic spectrum.
1903 Edinb. Rev. Oct. 385 Sub-atomic physics.
1920 Electr. World 3 Apr. 769/1 The conditions which determine the electrical and magnetic properties of the material are submolecular and perhaps subatomic.
1952 G. Gamow Birth & Death of Sun (new ed.) ii. 47 Bohr's theory of the atom made for tremendous progress in our understanding of subatomic phenomena.
1993 H. Gardner Creating Minds iv. 125 General relativity explained the large-scale working of gravity and cosmology, but it could not apply appropriately at the atomic and subatomic levels.
2006 K. R. Lang Sun, Earth, Sky (ed. 2) i. 10 When subatomic matter and anti-matter collide, they destroy each other, releasing pure radiative energy.
Inter-atomic:
Existing or acting between atoms.
1863 J. Tyndall Heat (1870) ii. §17. 23 The material theory supposes..a subtle fluid stored up in the inter-atomic spaces of bodies.
1889 Nature 19 Sept. 509/2 From the motions of the heavenly bodies down to the minutest interatomic movements in chemical reactions.
Atomic:
Hist. Sci. Designating the doctrine of atoms taught by Leucippus and his pupil Democritus in the 5th cent.b.c.; relating to this doctrine.
1678 R. Cudworth True Intellect. Syst. Universe Pref. sig. *v, The First Chapter, is an Account of the Atomick Physiology, as made the Foundation of the Democritick Fate.
1691 J. Ray Wisdom of God 42, I do not think it agreeable to Philosophick Verity and Accuracy; but do rather incline to the Atomick Hypothesis.
1704 W. Sherlock Disc. Happiness I. ii. ii. 77 The Substance of all Material things is the same, diversified by different Qualities and Accidents; or, to speak in the Atomic Language, by different Magnitudes, Figures, Sites, and Motion.
a1770 J. Jortin Tracts (1790) II. 255 In the passage of Lactantius..quoted above, the invention of the atomick doctrine is ascribed to Leucippus.
1809 ‘D. Knickerbocker’ Hist. N.Y. (1861) 7 The great atomic system taught by old Moschus..revived by Democritus of laughing memory; improved by Epicurus..and modernized by the fanciful Descartes.
1878 B. Stewart & P. G. Tait Unseen Universe (1880) 37 Adopting like Epicurus the atomic or corpuscular theory of things.
1940 G. Gamow Birth & Death of Sun ii. 17 The atomic hypothesis also appeared to him [sc. Democritus]..to satisfy his philosophic preconception concerning the fundamental simplicity of nature.
1998 Ambix 45 17 The three-dimensionality accorded to these particles is a counterpart to the atomic system of Leucippus and Democritus.
Atom: In philosophical and scientific uses chiefly relating to the structure of matter.
Hist. Sci. With reference to ancient Greek philosophy: a hypothetical particle, minute and indivisible, held to be one of the ultimate particles of matter.Leucippus and his pupil Democritus, in the 5th cent. b.c., taught that the universe and its constituents are formed by the coming together of such particles in various ways.
a1500 (▸c1477) T. Norton Ordinal of Alchemy (BL Add.) (1975) l. 2296 Substance resoluynge in attoms with wondire.
1546 T. Langley tr. P. Vergil Abridgem. Notable Worke i. ii. 4 b, Epicurus one of Democritus dysciples putteth two Causes Atomos or motes and Vacuitie or Emptinesse; of these he saith the foure Elementes come.
1635 D. Person Varieties v. 62 Democritus and Leucippus..imagined the beginning of the world and of all contained therein to have beene by the casuall encounter of Atoms..which are little insectile bodies..not unlike the Moates which wee see to tumble and rowle about in the Sunne beames.
1678 R. Cudworth True Intellect. Syst. Universe i. i. 16 Asclepiades..supposed all the Corporeal world to be made..of Dissimilar and inconcinn Moleculæ, i.e. Atoms of different Magnitude and Figures.
1707 Swift Tritical Ess. in Misc. (1711) 249 That the Universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of Atoms.
a1833 R. Watson Theol. Inst. (1850) 297 If the concourse of atoms could make this world, why not..a porch, or a temple, or a house, or a city, as Tully speaks?
1895 Q. Rev. Apr. 492 A purely reasonless concourse of atoms.
1907 I. W. Riley Amer. Philos. iii. i. 197 The world had not a beginning from a casual concourse and jumble of atoms.
1947 H. Miller Hist. Introd. Mod. Philos. iv. 59 Smallest and smoothest of all, and therefore speediest and most penetrating, are the atoms of light, the movement of which Democritus identified with consciousness or intelligence.
2003 C. Wilson in J. Miller & B. Inwood Hellenistic & Early Mod. Philos. v. 112 According to Cicero, the Epicureans, to avoid the inference that the gods were composed of atoms like everything else, and were perishable, ascribed to them quasi-bodies.
Atom: Originally (without explicit reference to Greek philosophy): each of the particles of which matter is ultimately composed, aggregates of which constitute material objects. Later: (Chem. and Physics) a particle of a chemical element which is the unit in which the elements combine and which cannot be further divided into smaller particles all having the properties of that element; the smallest particle in which a chemical element exists and combines.
The idea that atoms could explain why chemicals react in proportions that are simple whole numbers arose with Dalton in 1802.
The atom is now held to consist of a positively charged nucleus, in which most of the mass of the atom is concentrated, around which negatively charged electrons form an orbiting cloud.
The idea of a composite atom arose from J. J. Thomson's discovery of the electron in 1897 (cf. note at , though Thomson thought the electrons and the positive charges were distributed throughout the atom. The concept of electrons orbiting a central nucleus was first proposed by Rutherford in 1909.
1555 R. Eden tr. Peter Martyr of Angleria Decades of Newe Worlde f. 335, The golde..is..very harde to bee gotten owte, bycause it consysteth of so smaule sparkes lyke vnto inuisible atomes of such lytelnesse that they can hardely bee perceaued with the eye.
1649 W. Charleton in tr. J. B. van Helmont Ternary of Paradoxes Proleg. sig. e, The imperceptible Emissions streaming, in a semi-immaterial thread of Atomes, from sublunary bodies.
1691 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 16 469 If an Atom of Water were expanded into a Shell or Bubble so as to be ten times as big in Diamiter.., such an Atom would become specifically lighter than Air, and rise.
1700 W. Salmon Pharmacopœia Bateana (ed. 2) i. ii. 111/1 The Salt of Tartar which is an Alcali, breaks into Atoms the fixed Acid Salt of the Sal Armoniack.
a1704 J. Locke Elem. Nat. Philos. in Coll. Several Pieces (1720) 229 It may be now fit to consider what these sensible bodys are made of, and that is, of unconceivably small bodyes, or atoms, out of whose various combinations bigger molleculae are made.
1729 S. Switzer Introd. Gen. Syst. Hydrostaticks & Hydraulicks I. i. x. 172 Air is a Body compos'd of minute, very light and inconspicuous Particles or Atoms, which mutually..cohere to one another, but yet leaves some small vacant Spaces within it self.
1764 tr. Voltaire Newtonian Philos. viii. 68 He [sc. Newton], like Gassendi, admitted of real atoms in divisible bodies; but..he thought these atoms, these indivisible elements, were continually changing one into the other.
1776 B. Higgins Philos. Ess. Light I. 212 Wherein..each phlogistic atom shall touch an acid atom.
1808 J. Dalton New Syst. Chem. Philos. I. ii. v. 365 It [sc. the ‘atom’ of oxynitric acid] consists of 1 atom of azote and 3 of oxygen.
1835 tr. A. M. Ampère in London & Edinb. Philos. Mag. 7 343 The term molecules I give to an assemblage of atoms held at a distance from each other by the attractive and repulsive forces proper to every atom... What I call atoms, are the material points from which these attractive and repulsive forces emanate.
1873 A. W. Williamson Chem. for Students §85 Each atom of oxygen in water is combined with two atoms of hydrogen.
1915 W. H. Bragg & W. L. Bragg X Rays & Crystal Struct. iii. 22 The X-ray spectrometer has already determined..the arrangement of the atoms in several crystals.
1934 C. C. Steele Introd. Plant Biochem. iii. viii. 66 Most of the natural sugars contain either six or twelve carbon atoms in the molecule.
1964 L. H. Van Vlack Elements Materials Sci. (ed. 2) iv. 101 Normally, no net diffusion is observed in a pure, single-phase material, because the atom movements are random, and the atoms are all identical.
1994 J. Farman Suspiciously Simple Hist. Sci. & Invention (new ed.) viii. 176 Electrons occupy fixed energy levels in the atom and can only absorb or give off energy by jumping from one energy level to another.
2005 R. McN. Alexander Human Bones vi. 153 Tropical grasses such as maize form a molecule with four carbon atoms in the first stage of photosynthesis.
Atom: Chem. A particle corresponding to the smallest quantity of a chemical compound or group that manifests its chemical properties, now recognized as a group of two or more atoms; a molecule or radical. Now hist.Cf. note at sense.
1808 J. Dalton New Syst. Chem. Philos. I. 219 An atom of water or steam, composed of 1 of oxygen and 1 of hydrogen.
1843 W. Gregory tr. J. Liebig Animal Chem. (ed. 2) i. 90 If..we suppose that from 2 atoms of starch, C24H20O20, the elements of 9 equivalents of carbonic acid are separated.
1873 A. W. Williamson Chem. for Students (ed. 3) xiii. 122, N H4 is a radical, analogous to potassium, and N H4 is capable in many compounds of taking the place of K. N H4 is called an atom of Ammonium.
1962 W. J. Moore Physical Chem. (ed. 4) vii. 212 The elementary corpuscles of compounds were then [sc. around 1811] called ‘atoms’ of the compound.
To split the atom , to cause atomic nuclei to undergo fission:
1909 Busy Man's Mag. Oct. 44/2 He [sc. Professor J. J. Thomson] is known both as ‘The Man of Ion’, and as the man ‘who split the atom’.
1930 D. L. Sayers & ‘R. Eustace’ Documents in Case ii. 262 If anyone goes quietly away into a corner to experiment with high-voltage electric currents, they start a lot of ill-informed rubbish about splitting the atom.
1932 Discovery Mar. 69/2 The problem of splitting the atom is briefly this: given..that at the centre of every atom there is a minute nucleus whose electrical charge fixes the elementary nature of the atom, can we by any agency detach a part of this charge?
1935 ‘J. Guthrie’ Little Country xxi. 335 With the blast of his cornet, Archibald Packer had split the Temmian atom.
1964 M. Gowing Brit. & Atomic Energy 1939–45 18 They bombarded a foil of the metal lithium, disrupting the lithium nuclei which, after combining with incident protons, split into two alpha particles. The experimenters had ‘split’ atoms by artificial means.
1981 Daily Tel. 24 Sept. 16/4 The first scientists to work on ‘splitting the atom’.
Atomic Bomb (n)
1914 H. G. Wells in Eng. Rev. 16 326 Never before..had there been a continuing explosive..; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.
1917 Yale Rev. Jan. 295 When you can drop just one atomic bomb and wipe out Paris or Berlin, war will have become monstrous and impossible.
1925 Punch 11 Feb. 152/2 When, like the bursting of atomic bombs, Cats call to cats and Toms miaul to Toms.
1932 H. Nicolson Public Faces xii. 325 We must now assume that a single atomic bomb is capable of destroying all matter within a circumference of seventy to eighty miles.
1945 Times 7 Aug. 4/1 President Truman announced..yesterday that the first atomic bomb had been dropped 16 hours before by an American aircraft on Hiroshima.
1963 N. Coward Diary 12 Jan. (2000) 525 He is deeply scared of the atomic bomb. I mean genuinely, gibberingly scared!
1992 N. Stephenson Snow Crash xxvi. 187 Bad news. A metavirus... It's the atomic bomb of informational warfare.
2005 New Republic 8 Aug. 21/2 Two North Korean..facilities were being used to produce..an atomic bomb in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
Proton
Physics and Chem. A subatomic particle that is a constituent of all atomic nuclei and has a positive charge numerically equal to that of the electron; (in chemical reactions) a hydrogen ion. Symbol p, (in chemical reactions) H+.The proton is a baryon with a mass of 938.272 MeV (approx. 1836 times that of the electron), spin of ½, isospin of ½, and positive parity. Its half-life, of the order of 1030 years, is so long that the particle was long thought to be completely stable.
The atoms of each element have a characteristic number of protons in the nucleus, known as the atomic number. The common isotope of hydrogen has a nucleus consisting of a single proton.
1920 Engineering 17 Sept. 382/3 Sir Ernest [Rutherford], replying, said that..a clear nomenclature was certainly wanted; the term ‘prouton’ for [read or] ‘proton’ might be suitable for the H nucleus.
1920 Nature 11 Nov. 357/1 The elements may be considered as being composed of these hydrogen nuclei or ‘protons’ as Sir Ernest Rutherford would have us call them.
1922 J. Mills Within Atom ii. 13 The hydrogen atom is composed of only one proton and one electron.
1933 A. S. Eddington Expanding Universe i. 8 Perhaps in the first stage only the rudiments of matter existed—protons and electrons traversing the void.
1941 Astounding Sci. Fiction June 16/2 The protons go into the proton analyzer, where the gravitons are ripped out of them.
Electron
1. A subatomic particle which has a negative electric charge equal in magnitude to the positive charge of the proton, is a constituent of all atoms, and is the principal carrier of electric current in solids. Also (occas.): the positive analogue or antiparticle of this (now called positron).Originally, the name electron was proposed for the electric charge associated with a univalent ion. Subsequently the name was given to the ‘corpuscles’ discovered in 1897 by J. J. Thomson in cathode rays, and carrying a negative charge of this magnitude. When the positron was discovered in 1933, its discoverer proposed negatron as a name for the electron, but that term gained little currency.
The mass of the electron is about 9 × 10−28 gram, 1/ 1836 that of the proton. Electrons orbit the positively charged nuclei of atoms and are responsible for binding atoms together in molecules, as well as for the electrical, thermal, optical, and magnetic properties of solids. In the modern classification of particles the electron is classed as a lepton.
positive electron
1891 G. J. Stoney in Trans. Royal Dublin Soc. 4 583 A charge of this amount is associated in the chemical atom with each bond...These charges, which it will be convenient to call electrons, cannot be removed from the atom; but they become disguised when atoms chemically unite.
1897 J. Larmor in Proc. Royal Soc. 63 365 To obtain a definite and consistent theoretical basis it was necessary to contemplate the material system as made up of discrete molecules, involving in their constitutions orbital systems of electrons.
1907 Westm. Gaz. 19 Feb. 2/1 When the atom is considered together with its electric charge it is called an ‘ion’, while the charge, considered in itself, is the ‘electron’.
1908 J. Davidson Testament 102 Repeating, in the microcosm, Electron, atom, system, universe.
1922 T. M. Lowry Inorg. Chem. xxxi. 550 Fluorine, with atomic number 9, very readily takes up an additional electron in order to complete the octet and enters into combination as a univalent anion, F−.
1930 ‘J. Taine’ Iron Star xvii. 289 Only the faint, flickering glow from the geyser of electrons lit the mounded crater with a dead light.
Neutron
†1. W. Sutherland's name for: a neutral particle consisting of a negative electron and a positive electron linked together.
1899 W. Sutherland in London, Edinb., & Dublin Philos. Mag. 5th Ser. 47 273 If the electrons are distributed through the æther, we must suppose that in æther showing no electric charge each negative electron is united with a positive electron to form the analogue of a material molecule, which might conveniently be called a neutron.
2. A neutral atom which, as a result of interaction with radioactivity, is in an unstable state in which ionization can readily occur. disused.
1912 E. M. Wellisch & H. L. Bronson in Amer. Jrnl. Sci. 33 497 On this view there must be present in the gas certain molecules, or neutrons, which are in a condition allowing of relatively easy ionization.
3.A subatomic particle which has a mass (939.6 MeV) very slightly greater than that of the proton but without an electric charge, is a constituent (with the proton) of all atomic nuclei except that of the common isotope of hydrogen, and can decay into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino (as in beta decay).Before its discovery by James Chadwick in 1932 the neutron was conceived as a close association of a proton and an electron. Rutherford (who communicated Glasson's 1921 paper to the Royal Society) discusses this concept in a paper of 1920 cited by Glasson, but without using the word neutron. Harkins (of Chicago) seems to have coined the term independently.
Neutron: delayed, fast, fission, slow, thermal neutron: see the first element.
1921 W. D. Harkins in London, Edinb., & Dublin Philos. Mag. 6th Ser. 42 309 Any complex atom has a mass and weight 0·76 per cent. less than the hydrogen atoms (neutrons) from which it may be assumed to be built.
1921 W. D. Harkins in London, Edinb., & Dublin Philos. Mag. 6th Ser. 42 315 The term neutron represents one proton plus one electron.
1921 J. L. Glasson in London, Edinb., & Dublin Philos. Mag. 6th Ser. 42 597 In the ordinary atom of hydrogen we have a single electron separated from the nucleus by a distance of the order of 10−8 cm. It is here contemplated that a more intimate union of the two is possible... Such a particle, to which the name neutron has been given by Prof. Rutherford, would have novel and important properties. It would, for instance, greatly simplify our ideas as to how the nuclei of the heavy elements are built up.
1930 E. Rutherford et al. Radiations from Radioactive Substances xvii. 523 The existence of a neutron, i.e. a close combination of a proton and electron, has been suggested.
1932 J. Chadwick in Nature 27 Feb. 312/1 These results..are very difficult to explain on the assumption that the radiation from beryllium is a quantum radiation, if energy and momentum are to be conserved in the collisions. The difficulties disappear, however, if it be assumed that the radiation consists of particles of mass 1 and charge 0, or neutrons. The capture of the α-particle by the Be9 nucleus may be supposed to result in the formation of a C12 nucleus and the emission of the neutron.
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