Is every atom unique?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science, Technology

4.8 • 985 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s hard to imagine something as mind-bogglingly small as an atom.

But CrowdScience listener Alan has been attempting to do just that. All things in nature appear to be different and unique; like trees and snowflakes, could it be that no two atoms are ever the same?

Alan isn’t the first person to wonder this. Philosopher and scientist Gottfried Leibnitz had a similar idea in the 17th century; in this episode, philosopher of physics Eleanor Knox helps us unpick the very idea of uniqueness.

And with the help of physicist Andrew Pontzen, presenter Anand Jagatia zooms into the nucleus of an atom in search of answers. Listener Alan has a hunch that the constant movement of electrons means no atom is exactly the same at any given moment in time. Is that hunch right? We discover that the world of tiny subatomic particles is even stranger than it might seem once you get into quantum realms.

Can we pinpoint where uniqueness begins? And if the universe is infinite, is uniqueness even possible?

In the podcast edition of this show, we peer into that expansive universe, as we discover that the quantum world of hydrogen - the tiniest and most abundant of all atoms - allows us to observe galaxies far, far away. Featuring: Dr Eleanor Knox – King’s College London Prof Andrew Pontzen – University College London Dr Sarah Blyth – University of Cape Town Dr Lucia Marchetti – University of Cape Town

Presented by Anand Jagatia Produced by Florian Bohr Editor: Cathy Edwards Production Coordinators: Ishmael Soriano and Liz Tuohy Studio Manager: Emma Harth

(Photo: Twelve snow crystals photographed under a microscope, circa 1935. Credit: Herbert/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:26.6	and Patty O'Connell for our daily podcast.
0:29.4	Newscast, listen on BBC Science. Welcome to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service, where this week we're taking you on a little journey.
0:43.0	And when I say little, I mean really, really tiny.
0:47.0	Imagine that you shrink yourself by even a factor of 100.
0:50.0	I'm Anan Jagatia and this is cosmologist Andrew Ponson.
0:58.0	Okay, so now you're around about the size of an insect say and you can imagine already I mean the world just seemed so different
1:05.4	if you shrink yourself just by a factor of a hundred. Andrew is shrinking us down to
1:09.9	miniscule proportions so that we can zoom right in to the smallest parts of our world.
1:15.6	But we are a very, very long way away.
1:18.0	So if we shrink ourselves by another factor of a hundred.
1:28.0	At this point we are around about the size of the width of a human hair so if you shrink yourself down you're now sort of lost in this forest of human hairs and the world would
1:35.1	seem a very, very frightening, very different place. But we've still got a long way to go.
1:40.0	We're going to shrink down by another factor of 100.
1:47.0	Now you're one micrometer across.
1:50.0	That's around about the size of a bacteria.
	...

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