by Michael Skinner

Created on: December 12, 2009

We humans are surface dwellers in every sense of the word.  Everything we experience about the world is what we can gather from exteriors.  We often require special instruments and years of diligent study to see into the heart of things.

The observation that we are surface dwellers only is especially true when it comes to atoms.  The largest components of the average atom by weight, neutrons and protons, are invisible to us.  They are hidden at the center or nucleus of the atom.  Every experience we have in our daily lives comes from our interactions with the surface of atom.  At the surface are the light and speedy electrons.  Electrons move nearly at the speed of light but like all things composed of matter, they can not break that universal speed limit.  Most of our everyday chemistry and physics comes from the interaction of electrons.

Electrons are electrically charged particles that fly around the outside of atom.  At the core of an atom are the nuclear particles:  protons and neutrons.  Neutrons have no charge and Protons have a positive electric charge.  If you ask most people what keeps an atom together they might say the electrical attraction between the electron and the proton.  On closer inspection it might be more accurate to say that electrical attraction is what keeps the electrons from flying off but it is not what keeps an atom from spontaneously breaking up.  What keeps the atom together is the strong nuclear force.  The strong force is much stronger than electromagnetism.  The proof of this is obvious.  Consider any atom more complicated than hydrogen.  Any atom with a higher atomic weight than hydrogen has more than one proton.  The protons are packed together tightly in the core of the atom.  They manage to stay packed together even through they are all positively charged and that positive charge pushes them away from each other.  Roughly speaking, the strong force is 137 times stronger than the electromagnetic force. 

One of the more obvious properties of matter is that two objects can not occupy the same place at the same time.  And again it is the electrons that exhibit this behavior.  They do it by several means but the most obvious is electrical repulsion.  If you bring two objects close together the electrons in each object will tend to want to stay way from one another because all electrons are negatively charged. 

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