Atom

I am everywhere. I am in the sweet juice of a strawberry and the fuzzy fur of a kitten. I am in the tallest mountains and the deepest oceans. I float in the air you breathe and twinkle in the most distant stars. But I am so, so, so small. You could fit millions and millions of me on the tip of your littlest finger, and you still wouldn’t be able to see me. I am a secret, tiny world all on my own. When I get together with my friends, we hold hands to build everything that you can see, touch, and feel. We link together to make your favorite toy, we stack up to make your cozy bed, and we float around to make the clouds in the sky. I am the basic building block for everything in the entire universe. I am the Atom.

My story started a very, very long time ago, even before your grandparents' grandparents were born. In a warm, sunny place called ancient Greece, way back in the 5th century BCE, a clever thinker named Democritus was munching on some cheese. He started wondering, what would happen if I cut this cheese in half, and then in half again, and again, and again. He imagined cutting the piece smaller and smaller until he finally reached a piece so tiny that it was impossible to cut anymore. He decided to call this tiny, 'uncuttable' piece 'atomos,' which was his word for something that cannot be divided. For thousands of years, people thought this was just a neat idea, a fun guess about how the world worked.

For a long, long time, I was just a whisper of an idea. Then, much later, scientists with curious minds and special tools started to prove that I was real. In the early 1800s, a scientist in England named John Dalton did all sorts of experiments. He showed everyone that different things were made of different types of me, and he thought I looked like a tiny, solid, hard ball, like a super small marble. But the story didn't stop there. Other scientists kept looking even closer. In 1897, a man named J.J. Thomson discovered that I wasn't just a solid ball. I had even smaller, teeny-tiny parts inside of me. Then, around the year 1911, another scientist named Ernest Rutherford found my very center, a little spot he called the nucleus. A couple of years after that, in 1913, a man named Niels Bohr imagined that my smallest parts were zipping around that nucleus, kind of like planets spinning around the sun.

Now that people know about me, they can understand how the world works. I am the reason a rock is hard and a bubble is light and airy. Because scientists took the time to get to know me, people can now build amazing things. They can make powerful computers that fit in your pocket, create medicines that help people get well when they are sick, and find new ways to make clean energy to light up our homes. I am in your breakfast, your bicycle, and even in you. We are all connected because we are all made of atoms. I can’t wait to see what wonderful things you will build with me one day.