About This Video
Just how small are atoms? And what's inside them? The answers turn out to be astounding, even for those who think they know. This fast-paced animation uses spectacular metaphors (imagine a blueberry the size of a football stadium!) to give a visceral sense of the building blocks that make our world.
Meet The Creators
Jonathan Bergmann
Educator
Andrew Park
Animator
Additional Resources for you to Explore
Whether we’re zooming in to the wavelength of a gamma ray or zooming out to the size of a galaxy, it can be difficult to wrap our heads around the big numbers we’re measuring—like nanometers (10-9meters) or gigameters (109). Take a look at these efforts to represent big numbers. What are the strengths of each? How would you represent a large number (like a gigameter)? Cary Huang: The Scale of the Universe 2 http://htwins.net/scale2/
PBS NOVA: A Sense of Scale: String Theory http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/sense-of-scale-string-theory.html
TED: Chris Jordan pictures some shocking stats http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html
More than 2,400 years ago, the Greek philosopher Democritus began thinking about how many times matter could be divided. He proposed that there were, in fact, tiny, indivisible pieces of matter that he called “atomos,” meaning “not to be cut.” This idea languished for about 2,000 years until scientists in the 19th and 20thcenturies gathered empirical evidence to support and refine it.
Research the history of atomic theory. What idea(s) prevailed during the two millennia between Democritus and the early 19thcentury scientist John Dalton? What knowledge did Dalton contribute, and how? When did we first have an inkling that there might be matter in unitseven smaller thanan atom, and how did scientists go about proving it?
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: The Particle Adventure http://particleadventure.org/index.html
PBS NOVA scienceNOW: Picturing Atoms http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/atoms-electrons.html
TED: Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything.html
TED: Brian Cox on CERN’s supercollider http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.html
Jon Bergmann: Flipped Learning http://flipped-learning.com/
