What Is Everything Made Of?

Step 1 of 5

Keep cutting and you run out of cutting.

Halve a piece of chalk, then halve the half. Do it again and again and you eventually reach a single atom, and there is no way to halve that and still have chalk.

Step 2 of 5

Atoms are unimaginably small.

A single sheet of paper is about half a million atoms thick. If one atom were blown up to the size of a pea, that pea would be as tall as a house next to a real one.

Step 3 of 5

There are only about a hundred kinds.

Everything you have ever touched is built from roughly a hundred different sorts of atom. Wood, water, iron and you are all the same small set, arranged differently.

Step 4 of 5

The arrangement is what makes the difference.

Charcoal and diamond are both nothing but carbon atoms. What separates a smudge from a jewel is only the pattern the atoms are locked into.

Step 5 of 5

Atoms are mostly empty.

An atom is a tiny heavy centre with a haze of electrons far out around it. If the centre were a marble on a football pitch, the electrons would be out by the fences.

If you squeezed the empty space out of every atom in a person, what was left would be smaller than a grain of salt — and would still weigh what they weigh.