The 5 year journey to finding the G Orbital of an atom.
I remember learning about atoms, these undividable (or so I thought) particles that we couldn’t see with our bare eyes but made up literally everything around us, in fifth grade. This was one of the few times that I remember the entire class being interested in what was being discussed.
Side note: if you want to get your students to be interested, then please actually teach new stuff. I think we learned the rock cycle at least three times in elementary school.
Maybe it was that child-like interest in brightly colored spheres in our textbooks that kept us paying attention. We all wondered if atoms actually looked like that if we saw it under a microscope. Of course, you can’t see atoms under a light microscope: you’d need an electron microscope for that!
The Three Subatomic Particles
Me, being the pesky kid I was in 5th grade, asked, “well what’s smaller than atoms?".
I should have my dialogue in blue
“I was just getting to that, Andrew. There’s three subatomic particles make up each atom: the proton, the neutron, and the electron”, the teacher replied.
These are composite subatomic particles.
I’ll spare you the details, so here’s a brief summary of what the three are.
The Proton
Protons are positively charged. If you remove an electron, the atom becomes +1 charge. You can think of electrons balancing out the protons and vice versa.
Protons determine the element or the type of atom it is. One proton? You’re hydrogen. Two protons? You’re helium. And you keep going until you run out of names and start naming elements like Ununennium.
