When, as kids, we first learn about the atom, we either see a picture of it in a book or see a model of it in a museum. It is all very neat and clean, but much more to the point, it is all very real. The nucleus has two types of particles, a neutron and a proton, and the number of these particles increases with weight. We can see the atoms on the connected Table of the Elements lined up in their neat little rows to demonstrate this. Then around each nucleus there are orbiting electrons. These electrons have been conveniently placed into shells which have, or at least used to have, a specific number of electrons, and the number of electrons in the outer shell is roughly related to the vertical rows on the connected Table.
All very neat and all very real.
Except for one thing.
It is a concept!
Concepts are not reality, but rather the mental constructs we create in our minds as we attempt to organize reality into the understandable pictures we use to communicate with on another.
The atom as constructed by empirical science is probably the closest empirical science has even come to reality for one simple reason. We can take elements, we can apply heat to them, we can then mix them, and when we let them cool, we get something entirely different than the elements that we started out with. There are literally billions, even trillions of possible mixtures and possible conditions under which the mixtures can be made to occur, and thus we are dealing in an area in which we don't filter scientific concepts through theorists for use by engineers, we are dealing with a field in which the technicians themselves are directly involved in the process. We are dealing with a science as it should be, a science whose concepts are directly tested in reality to produce technology.
We engage in chemistry, which is the mixing of elements under differing conditions,because it provides us with enormous technological benefits. Thomas Edison would have scoffed at the notion that his invention of the light bulb had anything to do with the confusing and basically nonunderstandable concepts empirical theorists set forth about the nature of light. Most of the advances in radar were made in spite of empirical theories about the nature of electromagnetic emissions, radiation if you will. And the invention of the transistor and the laser simply have no a priori empirical theory connecting them to anything.
While the atom as described by empirical science is close to reality because it can be used by chemists to guide them in their explorations of potential technology, the usefulness of the atom has pretty much given way to the boring process of trial and error that is the foundation of all other technological endeavors simply because the atom has outlived its usefulness in guiding the production of technology. It is a concept that has passed its prime. Empirical science, however, does not abandon its concepts because it believes those concepts to be real, that the pictures in the books, the models in the museums, the charts on the wall all reflect the exact nature of the reality in which we live. The concept of the atom was, however, flawed at the outset.
Probably the biggest defect in the atom as constructed by empirical science is that it was not designed to account for the production of heat or light. When the atom was constructed a hundred years ago, light was still thought to be a wave. As a wave, light did not exist other than as a disturbance of a medium through which it passed. Maxwell's equations dealing with the electromagnetic spectrum were still recent and controversial, and Michelson and Morley's failed experiment designed to demonstrate the existence of the aether through which light traveled was wrapped up in proposals such as the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations which tried to account for the failure of the Michelson and Morley experiment by claiming that matter expanded and contracted with speed.
Energy, on the other hand, heat, had long been determined to be the result of the vibrations of the particles that made up matter and thus was not involved in the actual construction of the atom.
When Rutherford first described the atom, he was not looking at its connection to light or energy. Rather, he was firing emissions into gases and watching some of the particles that made up the emissions being deflected by something in the gas. That something had to be denser than the particles that were being deflected and this led him to hypothesize the existence of an atomic nucleus. In due course, firing emissions into gases and watching some of the particles that made up the emissions being deflected by something in the gas became the demonstration of the existence of nuclei in chemical elements. That's the empirical process. See something, make up an explanation for it, and what is seen proves the explanation to be fact.
At this point, practicality took over. If indeed there was a nucleus, what would that nucleus have to account for?
First, it would have to account for weight. John Dalton, at the beginning of the 19th Century, had proposed that each element had a characteristic atomic weight. Toward the end of the 19th Century, Mendeleev grouped these weights in accordance with their chemical properties which, generally speaking, dealt with their interactivity. Arranging the elements by their chemical properties into a periodic table of elements, Mendeleev was able to show that there were spaces that should contain elements. When those elements were found, the periodicity of the table was validated.
Because empirical science is a process in which effects are named rather than understood, a neutron was placed into the nucleus to account for weight. Next, empirical science had to deal with Mendeleev's chemical properties. Here empirical science took a leap of faith that is fatal to its concept of the atom.
Finding an analogy at the time wasn't difficult. The streams that Rutherford was generating, and indeed, the flows of emissions that were being discovered and used as X-rays discovered at the end of the 19th Century by Roentgen, were capable of being deflected by magnets (the basis of our television technology). Magnets were not understood by any means, but their behavior was well documented. When a magnet was hung by a string, one end pointed north and was named the north end of the magnet, although nowadays the likes repel rule has brought that hasty naming into question. The end opposite the north end was labeled the south end of the magnet. It was known that the north ends repelled one another but were attracted to the south ends.
When explanations for electricity were developed, also during the later half of the 19th Century, it was known that magnets could be used to generate electricity and empirical science's monkey see, monkey say process compelled it to analogize the movement of electricity to the polarity of magnets, with the north and south poles of the magnets becoming the positive and negative poles of an electric circuit. As the emissions boiling off the anode in Roentgen's cathode ray tube had been identified by the cathode's inventor, Thompson, as electrons, and those electrons were deflected by electromagnets, the explanation for the chemical properties of the atom, their ability to interact with one another, was connected to the electrons that nuclei in the gas were scattering.
Thus, the chemical interaction in Mendeleev's table was the result of the interaction of the electrons that were orbiting the nucleus. If electrons were orbiting the nucleus, something had to be keeping them in place. Notice, nothing had to keep them in motion. They just needed something to keep them in place. Because an electron was negative, there must by a positive particle in the nucleus keeping them in place, and this created particle became the proton. To account for the periodicity, the number of electrons in the shell had to change, and because the properties were repetitive, the number of shells had to increase. As a result, the number of protons, like the number of neutrons, increased with the weight of the atom with the number of electrons in the outer shell becoming repetitive, producing periodicity.
Several decades into the 20th Century, it finally dawned on our indominatable empiricists that an atom that didn't account for the production of light wasn't too swift. Einstein had discovered the photoelectric effect, which led to naming light, a wave until then, when it presented itself as a particle, a photon. It was left to the quantum theorists to come up with the really nifty idea that when an atom absorbed light energy, the orbiting electrons' orbits expanded and when it gave up light energy, those same orbits contracted.
This played to the basic weakness of the empirical concept of the atom, that there was no explanation for what was making the electron orbit the atom in the first place. That was one of those things that could be ignored, just like the nature of the current force that causes objects to drop, or planets to orbit and rotate, or, for that matter for galaxies to rotate can be ignored. Empirical science simply doesn't have to talk about the things it can't explain or the things its theories fail to cover.
If we have an electron that can orbit the nucleus without any source of force, then why not have that electron jump up and down in orbit as a result of some mysterious absorption and release of light?
The empirical picture of the atom presented an even greater problem, however. If electrons and protons attracted one another, then electrons would repel electrons and protons would repel protons. In using the shell theory of the atom to explain the chemical interaction of the elements, empirical science could finesse this little problem by using the shared orbits model. When two elements combined chemically, the nuclei of the unlike elements were sharing electrons in the outer orbit, and that was what was holding the matter together.
However, it was less clear what was holding the matter together in the first place. If the outer shells were what was interacting, then electrons were interacting, and those electrons should repel the nuclei, not bring them together. If an atom has two or three shells of electrons between its surface and its nucleus, then how do those outer shells come together to form matter? Sharing electrons in the outermost shells wouldn't overcome the repelling done by the next shells under. How atoms formed molecules and how those molecules formed matter was, and remains, a sort of hazy picture of equilibriums, of the balances of opposing forces which somehow work together to produce solid matter. In spite of all the ambiguity, I still hear statements from the empirical cognocenti that the reason we don't sink through the surface of the Earth is that the orbiting electrons on the surface are repelling the orbiting electrons of the atoms that make up the leather on the soles of our shoes. If that's the case, then why aren't the particles of earth and the particles of leather repelling one another also?
But empirical science was faced with an even bigger problem as the 20th Century progressed and more attention was paid to what was going on as a result of the atom. In its neat little picture of a nucleus made up of neutrons and protons, with orderly orbiting shells of electrons, and with the opposites attracting likes repelling analogy borrowed from the field of magnetics where nothing was understood, the protons should be sitting there in the nucleus repelling one another. How was it possible for a nucleus to have more than one proton when protons repelled one another? There could never be more than a single proton in a nucleus of an atom.
Empirical science, however, is never at a loss for creating that which it needs to cover over that which it doesn't understand. Empirical science is the process of naming rather than understanding. It started off with the holy grail of ignorance, the nature of the force that causes objects to drop. It has no idea what this force is, so it simply names it and lets it go at that. The force that causes objects to drop is gravity. It is a property, like the color of the elements, the hardness of the elements, or even like Mendeleev's chemical properties. It just exists. So, we have one force, there must be others.
Empirical science knows nothing about the nature of electricity or magnetism, and it is totally ignorant, by design, of the nature of light and even heat, so why not just create another force to cover all those areas of ignorance. It created the electromagnetic force and said, that's that. We now know all we need to know about magnetism, electricity and light.
Now, faced with the fact that the protons they made up and placed in the nuclei of atoms should be repelling, they simply made up another force, the strong force, and said that's what's holding the protons together. The strong force holding the protons together is stronger than the force repelling them.
And atoms decay because of the weak force. After all, if there is a strong force, there is certainly going to be a weak force.
As for the orbiting electrons? They are now pictured, probably accurately, as simply being a cloud of uncountable electrons orbiting the atom in accordance with the amount of positive force at the center of the atom.
Quite a mishmash for a profession that professes perfect knowledge and is only a breath away from discovering the theory of everything, TOE for short.
Next week, I will construct an atom out of the single elementary particle with its at rest motion and affinity propensity, and then put that atom through a number of real world tests to check its validity.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com