On Saturday I went on a tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, just miles from where I grew up. At SLAC they’re in the business of making atoms move really, really fast, and then smashing them together, and poking through the wreckage to see what’s inside.
The accelerator is an extremely large facility – at two miles long, the longest building in the world – dedicated to work on the extremely small. The tour was assembled by my friend Kishore Hari, who runs a science café and has a passion for making science accessible to anyone, and our guide was Adam Cunha, a graduate student who has worked at SLAC.
Adam Cunha points out a "light tube" at SLAC.
Adam led us through a Power Point presentation and walked us around the accelerator with smiling enthusiasm. Rather than dwelling on the facility and its science, which you could learn about here, I will share the most mind-blowing thing I learned that day.
Adam gave this analogy to explain atoms. Let’s say you puffed up an apple so big its diameter extended from the Earth to the sun (take that, New York!). If an apple were that huge, how big would one of its atoms be?
Answer: the size of a football field.
OK so far. Pretty small. But does that mean that this magnificent apple is made up of football-field-sized chunks? No. All that means is that the components of an atom – its nucleus and electrons – exist in that football-field sized space.
So how big are the nucleus and electrons? The nucleus, Adam continued, is the size of an apple seed in the middle of that football field. And the electrons are far smaller than that. They are, in Adam’s words, “the size of a small virus,” which is to say, so small they’re hard to measure. In fact, Adam concluded, current theory holds that electrons don’t have any size at all. Oh, and they don’t really exist anyplace, either. There’s just a probability they exist.
This means that all matter – your hands, your mouse, the coffee cup, the screen upon which you read this – are made up of infinitesimally teeny bits of almost-nothing. How can something that appears so substantial in fact be the exact opposite? Mind blown. Game over.
The scientists at SLAC have been examining these apple seeds and viruses and finding out what they’re made of. And while I can’t say I understand what they do, I do believe these atom-busting cowboys deserve the four Nobel prizes, three in physics and one in chemistry, they have earned so far.
Leave a Reply