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Einstein's relativity theory predicted that as an object increases its speed, it gets heavier and shorter. Its clock also goes slower, eventually coming to a stop at the speed of light. To most people these predictions seemed quite ridiculous. Today they are verified by a multitude of observations and must even be taken into account when designing machinery that accelerates particles to very high speeds.
Einstein proposed his theories because of small deficiencies in the then current theories. To the present, no verified deficiencies have come to light with Einstein's theories but if and when they do, they will have to give way to the new.
Science is a progressive and evolving undertaking. The true scientist is a dedicated and unbiased seeker after truth. Naturally, there is much that makes the claim of being science or scientific that is not actually so.
And what makes dirt?
Now we get down to the nitty gritty of a science update. Matter, be it dirt, rocks, trees, cans of peaches, the hair on our heads, the flesh of our arms, the air, the wind, the rain, the ice or snow, all such matter is made from elements joined together in various kinds of combinations.
Elements are the basic bits and pieces. Other things are mixtures of elements, or elements that have joined together in a chemically combined form. Iron is a metallic element. Living things, be they trees or bees, consist mostly of atoms of the elements carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen chemically combined into the various kinds of molecules that make wood or flesh or feathers. Rocks and earth consist mostly of metallic elements in combination with those that form acids.
Elements are made from atoms. Near enough for our purposes, an atom is the smallest part of an element that can exist independently.
What makes atoms?
For a long time it was believed that an atom was a fundamental unit that could not be split into parts. The composite nature of the atom was discovered at the beginning of this century by New Zealand physicist, Ernest Rutherford.
An atom has a nucleus that is about a thousand-billionth of a centimeter across. This nucleus is surrounded by a cloud of electrons, each of which has a negative charge that is matched by a positively charged proton within the nucleus of the atom. The very smallest element is hydrogen which consists of a single proton and single electron. Element number 100 is called Fermium and has 100 electrons and 100 protons.
What do electrons do?
Electrons are arranged about the nucleus of the atom in specific shells which tend to gain or lose electrons depending upon how full a shell might be. This remarkable fact is why we can have so many different forms of matter.
Carbon, for example, has a form in which it likes to share four of its electrons with other elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. By doing so, it can form millions of "organic" chemicals with an enormous range of properties. Hydrogen is good at sharing, its best known product being water. A molecule of water has two hydrogen atoms stuck to a single oxygen atom.
Whereas what the electrons do is responsible for the formation of the myriad of chemical compounds we find in our environment, it is the content of the nucleus that differentiates the elements from one another. Some of the elements we are familiar with are the gases hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, neon used in neon light bulbs and helium used in balloons.
Most of the common metals we use are elements--copper, lead, zinc, iron, aluminum, tin, mercury, silver and gold. A few non-metallic elements such as carbon and sulfur also occur free in nature. However, the great bulk of those materials we call matter--the earth and its rocks and the sea are composed of elements in chemical combinations called molecules.
What makes electricity?
Electrons are important to us in free form. When liberated from their parent atoms they supply the electricity that powers our homes and our industries. An electric current is simply a moving stream of electrons, as are the lightning discharges we see during storms.
What does an electron look like? Well, it's a bit queer. Sometimes it appears to be a wave and other times, a particle. More on that later. It used to be thought of as a "point," which means it has no length or breadth. Now we know it is tiny, somewhere between 10-19 and 10-22M which is far too tiny to see. But it could be a billion billion times smaller and still have spatial dimensions (i.e. the electron is much bigger than the minimum possible size called the Planck length). So there is plenty of room for an electron to have a sub-structure.
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