yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

What Are Atoms and Isotopes?


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

So what's an atom? An atom is, um, oh man, something that builds up everything. An atom, oh that one, um, the small particle, isn't it? That's a very small, um, particle. An atom was the smallest indivisible part of an element. You can further divide an atom into protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons, is that it? It's just a small little thing that's made up of protons, electrons, and a neutron.

All of the materials and things are made up of atoms. And then you've got the nucleus and the electrons that go around the outside. That would be an atom, which is made up of the nucleus and electrons. There can be dozens of these electrons ringing around in different scales, different orbits, and it's mainly, mainly nothing.

This is how it's represented: Y is the proton, and that's the electron, and then you have a neutron in there as well. And this thing spins around. But so it seems most people are comfortable, able with the idea that all matter is made up of atoms, that an atom is the fundamental building block of matter, and that these atoms are made up of smaller particles called protons, electrons, and neutrons.

But after that, the details get a little bit hazy. It looks a bit like Saturn. It does, it looks very much like Saturn. So what I'd like to do is actually build an atom, or at least a model of an atom. So I've got here a proton, neutron, and electron. The simplest atom that I can make is hydrogen because hydrogen consists of only two particles: a little positive proton and a tiny little negative electron.

They're attracted to each other because of their opposite charge. And so many people think of the electron as orbiting about the proton. That's not strictly true. I mean, it's not like a planet going around the Sun. But because the proton is positively charged and the electron is negatively charged, they're both attracted towards each other.

Now what would happen if we took our hydrogen atom, which consists just of a proton and an electron, and we added a neutron into the nucleus? This hasn't really changed anything electrically because the proton and the electron are still opposite charges and attracting each other, and the neutron is neutral, so it doesn't really affect this interaction.

So the atom that we have here is still hydrogen, except it's just a little bit more massive. You could say it's heavier because the neutron is there. But, um, how does that really affect the behavior of this atom? Well, the truth is, it's not that different from regular hydrogen. And this is what we call an isotope. An isotope is a different version of the same element, so it has the same number of protons in the nucleus but just a different number of neutrons.

More Articles

View All
The Bayesian Trap
Picture this: You wake up one morning and you feel a little bit sick. No particular symptoms, just not 100%. So you go to the doctor and she also doesn’t know what’s going on with you, so she suggests they run a battery of tests and after a week goes by, …
Experiencing the currents of the coral reef | Never Say Never with Jeff Jenkins
JEFF: I’m a big guy, so I didn’t think that a current could actually push my body the way that it is. The most challenging thing about being in this current is to be at the mercy of Mother Nature and allowing the current to take you wherever it takes you…
Why Millennials Don’t Make Enough Money
What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here. So this has been a really good week. I’ve had the chance to cover my two favorite topics on the history of the universe. One would be Robin Hood’s investing platform, and number two, as you could see from the title of…
A Grim Warning For All Investors
What’s up, guys? It’s Graham here. So originally, I had another video that was planned to post today, but with everything going on, I felt like it would be more appropriate to address everybody’s concerns and share my own thoughts about what’s actually ha…
Speed and precision of DNA replication | Biomolecules | MCAT | Khan Academy
In the earlier video on DNA replication, we go into some detail about leading strands and lagging strands and all of the different actors, all of these different enzymatic actors. But I left out what is probably the most mindboggling aspect of all of this…
Derivative as slope of curve | Derivatives introduction | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
What I want to do in this video is a few examples that test our intuition of the derivative as a rate of change or the steepness of a curve, or the slope of a curve, or the slope of a tangent line of a curve, depending on how you actually want to think ab…