Scienstists are always talking confidently about atoms and their behaviour, as if they could see exactly what

they were like and what they did. At the same time they are very prone to give graphic illustrations of their very small size, such as the well-know one that if a drop of water were magnified to the size of the world, the atoms in it would be about as large cricket balls. The purpose of this chapter is to give you some idea of the experiments and the reasoning which have led them to their conceptions about atomic structure and atomic properties. One of the questions which interested the ancient Greeks was what is the unlimate structure of matter? Let us imagine ourselves doing what they pictured, talking a piece of matter and cutting it into smaller pieces, and then each piece into smaller pieces still. Could one go on for ever, or would one in the end arrive at bits which could not be divided any more and were the final bricks of which all matter is build? Democritus suggested that this is so, and called the final bits atoms, or things which could not be cut. He was only speculating, but we can now give his idea a more exact form, and we have adopted his name of atom. We might picture ourselves taking a cube of soap an ich each way, because it would be a convenient thing to cut, and as our first step slicing it into cubes one-tenth of the size each way. Now let us take one of these bits and repeat the process; it would not be very easy, but with a steady hand and a safety razor blade it might be done. Stage three would be a ticklish job; one would have to look at the tiny fragment under a microscope and use what are called micro-manipulators to handle it, but these instruments are now so delicate that even stage four could be archived with them. Our cubes are, of course, now one ten-thausandth of the size each way of the cube with which we started. The interesting thing is that we are now half-way to the atom. If we could go on, when we reach stage seven we would be chopping into the molecules or little agglomerations of atoms of which soap is made, and stage eight we would be separating these into individual atoms. Tp out it more exactly, the distance be