Abstract
The idea of an atom has a long history. Around twenty-five hundred years ago, Greek philosophers argued that matter must be built up of small, hard, identical pieces. Because these pieces were thought to be irreducible they were called “atoms.” The word “atom” is derived from the Greek for “uncuttable.” The pieces, or atoms, come in only a few kinds, said the Greek philosopher Thales, and the complexity we observe in nature arises from the variety of ways in which these building blocks go together and come apart.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Holbrow, C.H., Lloyd, J.N., Amato, J.C. (1999). The Chemist’s Atoms. In: Modern Introductory Physics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3078-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3078-4_3
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-3080-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-3078-4
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