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- [Narrator] You're walking on the street

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and suddenly you find a piece of gold,

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you pick it up and you get super curious.

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You have a lot of questions in your mind.

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One of the questions is,

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what happens if you were to break it?

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I mean, surely you can't
break it with your own hands

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but hey, when has that stopped you

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from imagining things, right?

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So what happens if you break this?

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Well, you get two pieces of
gold and then you wonder,

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well, what if you break it even further?

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You get even more smaller pieces.

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And what if you break it even further?

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We get even more smaller pieces.

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And now you start wondering,
"Hey, can I keep doing that?"

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Can I keep breaking this
piece of gold forever?

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That's what we we're gonna
talk about in this video.

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This was a question

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that many ancient philosophers
from India, Greece, Roman,

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probably many more, pondered upon.

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They wondered, if you take any element,

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remember what elements are?

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These are roughly about
100 building blocks

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that make up all the
matter in the universe

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gold is an example of them.

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So they wondered, if you take any element,

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could you keep breaking them down forever?

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And a lot of them thought,
that maybe the answer is no.

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Maybe you can't keep breaking it forever.

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Maybe eventually, you will get

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one last smallest piece of that element,

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a smallest piece of gold, for example,

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which you cannot break any further.

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A lot of people believed in this idea,

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and the Greeks actually named
this smallest piece, the atom.

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The word atom literally means uncuttable

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because they believe that you
cannot break this even more.

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Now, for a long time,

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many people didn't believe in this idea.

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So for centuries, the idea
of atom was suppressed

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until it was revived back by
scientists like John Dalton.

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And today we have plenty of
evidence that they do exist.

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So, what exactly are atoms?

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Well, think of atoms as the
smallest piece of an element

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that has all the
properties of that element.

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It is literally the building
block of the element itself.

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For example, what's a gold atom?

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Gold atoms are the
smallest pieces of gold,

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which has all the properties of gold.

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They're the building blocks of gold.

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What's a carbon atom?

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Well, they are the
smallest pieces of carbon

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They're the building blocks of carbon.

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They have all the properties of carbon.

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And just to give you another
example, what's mercury atom?

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They're the smallest pieces of mercury.

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They have all the properties
of the element mercury

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and so on and so forth.

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Now, one question you could be having is,

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do atoms look like tiny balls?

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And the answer is no, it's
just a representation.

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In reality, atoms are so incredibly tiny,

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we can't even see them with microscopes.

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So how tiny are they you ask?

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Well, their size is
incredibly hard to comprehend.

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So here's a way to think
about it, how many gold atoms

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do you think you will find
in a typical gold ring?

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Well, it's not millions, not
billions, it's sextillions

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that's one followed by 21 zeros,

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that many atoms you'll
probably find in a gold ring.

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And just to get a sense of this number

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scientists estimate that
that is roughly about

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the total number of stars
in the observable universe.

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Let that sink in. That's
how small atoms are.

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So long story short, almost
all the matter in the universe,

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from the microbes to dogs and cats,

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to mountains to planets and stars,

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and almost everything that
you see in this universe,

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they're all fundamentally
made of elements.

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These are the building blocks

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of all the matter in the universe.

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We have about 100 of them.

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But what are elements
fundamentally made of?

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Elements like gold or any
other element for that matter

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they are fundamentally made of atoms.

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They are the smallest
pieces of the elements,

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the building blocks of the elements

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that contain all the
properties of that element.