Matter is defined as anything that occupies space and has mass.

It is the stuff our universe

is made of. All of the objects around us, from rocks to pizza to people, are examples of matter.
Notice that our definition of matter uses the term mass rather than weight. The words mass and
weight are often used interchangeably even though they refer to different things. Mass refers to
how much matter there is in a given object, whereas weight refers to the force with which the
object is attracted by gravity (Brady, 2012 : 5).

In the fi fth century b.c., the Greek philosopher Democritus expressed the belief that all
matter consists of very small, indivisible particles, which he named atomos (meaning uncuttable
or indivisible). Although Democritus’ idea was not accepted by many of his contemporaries
(notably Plato and Aristotle), somehow it endured. Experimental evidence from early scientifi c
investigations provided support for the notion of “atomism” and gradually gave rise to the
modern defi nitions of elements and compounds. It was in 1808 that an English scientist and
schoolteacher, John Dalton, formulated a precise defi nition of the indivisible building blocks of
matter that we call atoms (Chang, 2008 :30).

One of Thomson’s primary goals in his cathode-ray tube experiments was to gain an
understanding of the structure of the atom. He reasoned that since electrons could be produced
from electrodes made of various types of metals, all atoms must contain electrons. Since atoms
were known to be electrically neutral, Thomson further assumed that atoms also must contain
some positive charge. Thomson postulated that an atom consisted of a diffuse cloud of positive
charge with the negative electrons embedded randomly in it. This model, shown in Fig. 2.9, is
often called the plum pudding model because the electrons are like raisins dispersed in a pudding
(the positive charge cloud), as in plum pudding, a favorite English dessert. (Zumdahl, 2014 : 51).

Since Rutherford’s time,as physicists have learned more and more about atomic nuclei,
the list of particles that make up nuclei has grown and continues to increase. As
chemists,however,we can take a simple view of the atom because only three subatomic particles
—the proton,neutron,and electron—have a bearing on chemical behavior. As noted earlier,the
charge of an electron is .That of a proton is equal in magnitude, . The quantity is called the
electronic charge (Brown, 2012 :44).
 Atoms of different elements have different sizes, so often the size of the sphere used to
represent an atom will be large for larger atoms and small for smaller atoms. This is done when
we particularly wish to emphasize size difference among atoms. Atoms combine in a variety of
ways to form all of the more complex substances we find in nature. One type of substance
consists of discrete particles called molecules, each of which is made up of two or more atoms.
Enormous numbers of different compounds as well as many elements exist in nature as
molecules. Another type of compound (called an ionic compound) consists of electrically
charged atoms. (Brady, 2012 :10-11)

The elements that normally occur as diatomic molecules are hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen,
and the halogens (H2,O 2,N 2,F 2, Cl 2, Br 2, and I2). Except for hydrogen, these diatomic
elements are clustered on the right side of the periodic table. Compounds composed of molecules
contain more than one type of atom and are called molecular compounds. A molecule of the
compound methane, for example, consists of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms and is
therefore represented by the chemical formula CH4 (Brown, 2012 :53).

Although many substances are molecular, others are composed of ions (pronounced “eye-ons”).
An ion is an electrically charged particle obtained from an atom or chemically bonded group of
atoms by adding or removing electrons. Sodium chloride is a substance made up of ions. An
atom that picks up an extra electron becomes a negatively charged ion, called an anion. An atom
that loses an electron becomes a positively charged ion, called a cation (Ebbing, 2009 :57).