- [Narrator] You're walking on the street
and suddenly you find a piece of gold,
you pick it up and you get super curious.
You have a lot of questions in your mind.
One of the questions is,
what happens if you were to break it?
I mean, surely you can't break it with your own hands
but hey, when has that stopped you
from imagining things, right?
So what happens if you break this?
Well, you get two pieces of gold and then you wonder,
well, what if you break it even further?
You get even more smaller pieces.
And what if you break it even further?
We get even more smaller pieces.
And now you start wondering, "Hey, can I keep doing that?"
Can I keep breaking this piece of gold forever?
That's what we we're gonna talk about in this video.
This was a question
that many ancient philosophers from India, Greece, Roman,
probably many more, pondered upon.
They wondered, if you take any element,
remember what elements are?
These are roughly about 100 building blocks
that make up all the matter in the universe
gold is an example of them.
So they wondered, if you take any element,
could you keep breaking them down forever?
And a lot of them thought, that maybe the answer is no.
Maybe you can't keep breaking it forever.
Maybe eventually, you will get
one last smallest piece of that element,
a smallest piece of gold, for example,
which you cannot break any further.
A lot of people believed in this idea,
and the Greeks actually named this smallest piece, the atom.
The word atom literally means uncuttable
because they believe that you cannot break this even more.
Now, for a long time,
many people didn't believe in this idea.
So for centuries, the idea of atom was suppressed
until it was revived back by scientists like John Dalton.
And today we have plenty of evidence that they do exist.
So, what exactly are atoms?
Well, think of atoms as the smallest piece of an element
that has all the properties of that element.
It is literally the building block of the element itself.
For example, what's a gold atom?
Gold atoms are the smallest pieces of gold,
which has all the properties of gold.
They're the building blocks of gold.
What's a carbon atom?
Well, they are the smallest pieces of carbon
They're the building blocks of carbon.
They have all the properties of carbon.
And just to give you another example, what's mercury atom?
They're the smallest pieces of mercury.
They have all the properties of the element mercury
and so on and so forth.
Now, one question you could be having is,
do atoms look like tiny balls?
And the answer is no, it's just a representation.
In reality, atoms are so incredibly tiny,
we can't even see them with microscopes.
So how tiny are they you ask?
Well, their size is incredibly hard to comprehend.
So here's a way to think about it, how many gold atoms
do you think you will find in a typical gold ring?
Well, it's not millions, not billions, it's sextillions
that's one followed by 21 zeros,
that many atoms you'll probably find in a gold ring.
And just to get a sense of this number
scientists estimate that that is roughly about
the total number of stars in the observable universe.
Let that sink in. That's how small atoms are.
So long story short, almost all the matter in the universe,
from the microbes to dogs and cats,
to mountains to planets and stars,
and almost everything that you see in this universe,
they're all fundamentally made of elements.
These are the building blocks
of all the matter in the universe.
We have about 100 of them.
But what are elements fundamentally made of?
Elements like gold or any other element for that matter
they are fundamentally made of atoms.
They are the smallest pieces of the elements,
the building blocks of the elements
that contain all the properties of that element.