It’s important that children understand from an early age that what they see with their eyes is not the fullness of reality. There is much, much more going on. So let’s talk about atoms!
What are we made of?
All matter – from insects, water and animals to planets, stars and galaxies – is made up of atoms. Atoms are the tiny building blocks of all matter, and they are truly astonishing once you start to look closely. Each atom is made up of three main types of particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons sit tightly packed at the centre of the atom in what’s called the nucleus. Electrons are much smaller and move around the nucleus in a kind of energetic cloud. IMAGE
These particles are the foundation of all the materials we know. Different combinations of atoms create different substances — whether it’s water, oxygen, skin, or steel. But we can’t see individual atoms because they are so, so small. Think of a pinhead. That could fit 10 million hydrogen atoms in it. And the human body has about 7 billion billion billion atoms. That’s a 7 followed by 27 zeros. Yep, atoms are really small, and there are loads of them everywhere, all the time. But when they join together, they make things called molecules, which join together to make all the stuff in the universe, including you!
But atoms don’t just make matter — they’re also behind much of the energy we use every day. For example, electricity is really just the movement of electrons through a wire. Heat, light, and magnetism are all related to how particles behave, how they move, and how they interact. Even light itself is made up of photons, which are particles of energy. These photons have no mass, but they carry energy across space — like from the Sun to Earth — and can act like waves or particles, depending on how we observe them.
This strange dual nature — being a wave and a particle at the same time — is at the heart of what we call quantum physics. It’s a branch of science that looks at how particles behave at the tiniest scales imaginable. Here, things don’t always follow the everyday rules. Instead, they move in unpredictable ways, pop in and out of existence, and even seem to affect each other across space.
It’s a reminder that the world is far more complex and beautiful than it may seem on the surface. The deeper we look, the more we discover that the universe is made of patterns, energy, and possibility — all woven from the tiniest particles of matter and light.
[…] study of colour and light. Every colour we see is a result of light being emitted or reflected by atoms. More specifically, it all comes down to electrons — the tiny, charged particles that move around […]