Atomic Understanding Of Matter

Atoms are a funny thing. From a young age, I was taught about them, but while the concept seemed so close to my grasp, it was seemingly out of reach.

The questions I had and pondered on were left unanswered by my limitations and lack of study in the study:

"So... atoms exist... but how small truly are they? How is it they precisely interact?" --and maybe the most interesting of these questions:

"How can I use this framework to draw further understanding and semi-acurately model physical scenarios in a logical and methodical way?"

Regardless of your stance on my normalcy as a child (or onwards), I think there is much to appreciate about the atom. In this section, we aim to cover some theoretical bases and the historical building blocks that have allowed for the more-detailed comprehension of our world we have today.

Historic Analysis:

The first to be recorded as discovering the atom--or its concept--date back to Greek philosophy, some 2,000 years ago, around the time of our LORD Jesus Christ--many years ago! From that point onwards, matter was thought to have an indivisble smallest unit.

Dalton, however, expanded and experimented on this idea, parting off the work of Joseph Proust and his law of definite proportions, which observed that a given substance or compound, regardless of volume or other properties, has a fixed mass ratio between its elemental consituents.

From this, alongside formalizing concepts about the atom (still maintaining that they were indivisible, which was later found to be less-than-completely-accurate), he observed another pattern: the ratios between substances composed of the elements typically are some fraction greater-than or less-than one with small whole numbers. More simply, we can observe that they usually vary relatively uniformly to what we've grow to expect working with molecular notation (CO2 and CO, for example, where we would expect the ratio between the first and second mass ratios of each of the molecules to be 2). This law is later dubbed the law of multiple proportions.