What is Quantum Mechanics?

What is the smallest thing you can think of? An ant? An eyelash? A grain of salt? Do you think salt is made of salt, an eyelash is made of some human corporeal matter, and an ant is made of ant material? What are the smallest pieces that make up them?

Everything that you can see, touch, smell, is made of little, super small, tiny particles called atoms. You can touch the table, then it is made of particles, you can smell the flower, the scent is made of particles, the air is made of particles, your body is made of particles, your heart, your brain, your blood, your bones, your hair, your eyelashes, your shoes, everything around us is made of particles, called ATOMS.

This is an atom. There are protons (depicted in red) and neutrons (depicted in blue) in the center of the atom and electrons (depicted in green) flying around them.

There are different kinds of atoms. Some of them are bigger and heavier than others. For example, one atom can be a blueberry, the other atom can be a grape, another one can be an orange, and another one can be a watermelon. They come in different sizes and different physical and chemical properties. All in all there are 118 different kinds of atoms. The list of all these atoms ever existed is shown on a table called periodic table.

When atoms get together they create MOLECULES. For instance when two blueberry atoms and one raspberry atom get together, they form a molecule of three atoms. This molecule will be neither a blueberry nor a raspberry or even a combined taste of blueberry and raspberry; it will be a totally different fruit! That is why we have so many different tastes, flavors, fragrances, materials, stuff around us, because all these atoms keep combining with each other creating molecules and producing all the different kind of things around us. Atoms and molecules create things such as metal, wood, plastic, water, blood, bones, smartphones, rivers, oceans, trees and rocks. So if you have 118 different atoms handy, then you have all the ingredients to create everything in this world!

Different atoms come together and make up the different molecules in the air

There are about 100 trillion cells in the body and each cell contains 100 trillion atoms in them. 1 trillion is the number equals to a million times a million, so briefly it is a lot! Consider all the salt grains around the world, in each country, in every city, in every home, 100 trillion atoms in one cell means, one cell contains 300 times more atoms than all the salt grains in the world! So again, imagine all those salt grains holding in one cell. And then imagine there are 100 trillion cells in our body. Aren’t we a huge universe of atoms?!

An atom is the particle that makes up everything in this world including our body, the air, clouds, objects around us and the scent of the flowers.

An atom is very tiny, but it is not the tiniest particle we know of… It turns out atom is made of even tinier particles. Two of these particles are protons and neutrons located in the center of the atom. The center of an atom is called NUCLEUS. The third particle in the atom is called electrons. Electrons fly around the nucleus.

Imagine an apple, there are seeds in the center. Those seeds represent protons and neutrons in the center of the atom. Now imagine the skin of the apple away from the nucleus, there are electrons as a part of the atom located around the nucleus. So atom is made of three tiny particles, which are protons, neutrons and electrons.

But this is not the end of the story. As Victor Hugo nicely puts: Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?

Guess what! Physicists recently discovered (1968) that protons and neutrons in the nucleus are made of even tinier particles. These tinier particles are called QUARKS. Since we don’t know if quarks can be broken into smaller pieces, quarks are accepted as one of the fundamental particles.

A proton is made out of 2 up and 1 down quark, a neutron is made out of 1 up quark and 2 down quarks

If a particle cannot be broken into smaller parts then it is called a FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLE.

Are you familiar with Smurfs? If so, you are one step closer to understand the nature of fundamental particles. Fundamental particles are exactly like Smurfs, they are tiny and all of them have their own quirks and unique characteristics! For instance, there are 6 types of quarks: charm quark, up quark, and top quark, also strange quark, down quark, and bottom quark. The first 3 are positive quarks and the last 3 are negative quarks just like some positive charming or negative down smurfs.