Can We Cut a Proton?

Can We Cut a Proton?

Atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Can we cut a proton? If we bombard protons at high energies with other elementary particles – other protons, say – we begin to glimpse more fundamental units hiding inside the proton.

Physicists now propose that so-called elementary particles such as protons and neutrons are in fact made of still more elementary particles called quarks, which come in a variety of « colors » and « flavors », as their properties have been termed in a poignant attempt to make the subnuclear world a little more like home.

Are quarks the ultimate constituents of matter, or are they too composed of still smaller and more elementary particles? Will we ever come to an end in our understanding of the nature of matter, or is there an infinite regression into more and more fundamental particles? This is one of the great unsolved problems in the science.

The transmutation of the elements was pursued in medieval laboratories in a quest called alchemy. Many alchemists believed that all matter was a mixture of four elementary substances: water, air, earth and fire, an ancient Ionian speculation. By altering the relative proportions of earth and fire, say, you would be able, they thought, to change copper into gold. The field swarmed with charming frauds and con men, such as Cagliostro and the Count of Saint-Germain, who pretended not only to transmute the elements but also to hold the secret of immortality.

Fire is not made of chemical elements at all. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Sometimes gold was hidden in a wand with a false bottom, to appear miraculously in a crucible at the end of some arduous experimental demonstration. With wealth and immortality the bait, the European nobility found itself transferring large sums to the practitioners of this dubious art. But there were more serious alchemists such as Paracelsus and even Isaac Newton. The money was not altogether wasted -new chemical elements, such as phosphorus, antimony and mercury, were discovered. In fact, the origin of modern chemistry can be traced directly to these experiments.

There are ninety-two chemically distinct kinds of naturally occurring atoms. They are called the chemical elements and until recently constituted everything on our planet, although they are mainly found combined into molecules. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Air is made mostly of the atoms nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), carbon (C), hydrogen (H), argon (Ar), in the molecular forms N2, 02, CO2, H2) and Ar. The Earth itself is a very rich mixture of atoms, mostly silicon, oxygen, aluminum, iron and magnesium (Silicon is an atom. Silicone is a molecule, one of billions of different varieties containing silicon. Silicon and silicone have different properties and applications).

Fire is not made of chemical elements at all. It is a radiating plasma in which the high temperature has stripped some of the electrons from their nuclei. Not one of the four ancient Ionian and alchemical “elements” is in the modern sense an element at all: one is a molecule, two arr mixtures of molecules, and the last is a plasma.