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
Flight at the Edge of the Ozone Layer | One Strange Rock
NARRATOR: 30 years ago, we discovered man-made chemicals had punched a hole in the ozone layer. Is that hole here to stay, waiting around to kill us? Today, we’re trying hard to find out. Morgan Sandercock is about to test an experimental plane, perfect f…
Racing 800 Miles in the Desert—in a VW Bug | National Geographic
The Baja 1000 is just one of the toughest off-road races that exists. Uh, it’s in Baja California in Mexico down the peninsula. It’s pretty much the race that you aspire to do in off-road racing. This year’s event is 828 miles and has, I believe, a 33-hou…
Introduction to Gibbs free energy | Applications of thermodynamics | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
Gibbs free energy is symbolized by G, and change in Gibbs free energy is symbolized by delta G. The change in free energy, delta G, is equal to the change in enthalpy, delta H, minus the temperature in Kelvin times the change in entropy, delta S. When de…
There’s a Bear in My Backyard | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
Foreign. It seemed to be happening everywhere this past summer. North of Boston, this is a very popular bear in Wilmington, popping up out of hedges and onto lawns. Near Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the video, you can see kids jumping off the playground equi…
Khan Academy Ed Talks with Chase Nordengren, PhD
Hello and welcome to Ed Talks with Khan Academy, where we talk to interesting and important people in the education space. I’m Kristen Deservo, the Chief Learning Officer here at Khan Academy, and looking forward to a conversation today with Dr. Chase Nor…
Introduction to frames of reference
I’d like to do in this video is talk about the notion of a frame of reference, and this is an introductory video. In future videos, we’ll go into a lot more depth. But a frame of reference is really the idea; it’s a point of view from which you are measu…