And the new picture of the inside of an atom that came from Rutherford,s and other new experiments is the one we are familiar with today. A very small, very dense, positively charged center, called the nucleus, surrounded by a swarm of very light, very high speed electrons buzzing around it. All things are made of atoms, all material things, that is. Trees and stones, birds and lakes, frogs and people. All things, no exceptions.
Atoms are very small.
In a single drop of sea water there are fifty billion atoms of gold. Enough gold that every person in the world could have five atoms of gold from that one drop. And yet you would have to distill two thousands tons of such water to get enough to see with the naked eye. Atoms, or combinations of atoms called molecules, are continually in motion, and that motion is what we call heat. Atoms make up the balmy air of a summer day.