"Work" and the scale of atoms

The word “work,” in physics has a special meaning, and is, as you said, defined as force multiplied by distance. Yes, if the object we are working on doesn’t move, we are not doing any work. This goes against the normal every day usage of the concept work. I sat all day today working at my computer, but I did very little physical “work.” There are a number of words that can get us tangled up like this. There is a wonderful glossary of misused science terms at http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/scenario/physlang.htm

About things the size of atoms. An atom is less than one ten-billionth of a meter across. (Squeeze a meter stick into a millimeter on a second meter stick, and then squeeze the second meter stick into another millimeter, and the smallest meter stick can measure ten or twenty atoms across one of its millimeters!) If an atom were the size of a big football stadium, a proton or a neutron would be about the size of a tennis ball an entire nucleus may be the size of a soccer ball. At that scale an electron would still be nearly invisible, maybe actually invisible, but in any case still incredibly tiny. As I understand it, the strings people talk about in “string theory” are about as much smaller than an electron as the electron is smaller than the atom. Atoms are too small to see with light, so it is small wonder (ahem) that we have no direct evidence of strings.

Technology advances, though, and each step along the way, every lesson we learn, every question we ask opens up a world of new mysteries. The string theorists hope that the Large Hadron (Protons and neutrons are hadrons.) Collider in Switzerland and France will lead them to data confirming or at least supporting the theory. It is good to know there will still be questions and more bigger machines to build after the LHC is running. :-)

Atomic Theory History Question

Did the Greeks discover atoms?

Democritus lived about two hundred years before Aristotle and Plato, and is often credited with originating the concept of the atom. He was a philosopher, and his idea was to try to explain why different materials had different properties, such as why are liquids flexible and solids less flexible. We know now that the atoms, for example in ice, water, and steam are all made of the same kinds of atoms. Many Greeks of the time thought that the highest form of research was thinking about things, because the mind and ideas are superior to the world and the senses, or something like that. The word "atom" means indivisible, and in that sense, the Greeks were sort of correct. I would argue they really had no idea what atoms really are.

John Dalton, in the early 1800's, more than 2,000 years after Aristotle, formulated the first modern version of atomic theory, and by then he had enough scientific data to actually do a pretty good job of describing an atom as we now understand it. Still, there was no direct evidence to prove the existence of atoms, and Dalton's atomic model was primitive by modern standards.

It wasn't until 1905 that Albert Einstein published a paper that actually proved the atomic theory, and even since then, the model of the atom has been corrected and improved many times. Murray Gell-Mann, a physicist who lives in Santa Fe, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research into the inner structure of protons and neutrons.