I don’t get how we discovered particles and that are so small. What could’ve possibly lead to a discovery of it?
In: Physics
Microscopes were first invented in the 16th century. And it was in that century that we discovered there were living things too small to see with the human eye.
Any time you make a piece of glass that isn’t perfectly flat, you’ve kind of made a lens. The glass distorts, but even a little glass bead or something shaped like a wine glass can magnify a bit.
Given how imaginative and curious some people are, it’s not too surprising that somebody would notice that effect, and start thinking “I wonder how far I can push this”. Some of those people were good with their hands and learned to make lenses.
Telescopes are valuable for explorers and soldiers, so there was economic backing for those, and if you’re making magnifying lenses for a telescope you can also make lenses for looking at small things. Looking at leaves and insects up close is fascinating, so that encouraged people to make better and better lenses, and eventually unlocked microbiology, and that was plenty of incentive to keep going and see what more we could discover.
A cloud chamber shows individual ionizing radiation events. The radiated particle might be too small to see, like an electron. But you can see the effects of the electron passing by.
People observe things and come up with theories to explain the observation and then do experiments to validate (or disprove) their theories.
One such scenario might be how a paddle wheel turns from the operation of steam. Steam is invisible and composed of particles too small to be observed with our eyes or a microscope, and we only “know” it exists as water molecules in a gas state because of experiment rather than direct observation with a super microscope.
Same for the discovery of the electron. A paddle wheel was placed in a cathode ray tube (like an old TV tube) and some invisible thing inside the tube made the paddle wheel spin when perturbed by a magnet. Observation led to theory which experimentally proved the existence of the electron.
We don’t need to directly see something to be able to measure it or understand it. I mean, we can’t see, for example, electricity, but we understand exactly what it is and how it work. The key is that we measure the properties of things from the way they interact with other things, and from those interactions, we can understand what they are and how they work.
For example, take the electron. You can’t see an electron even with any kind of microscope, but we know plenty about electrons. Electrons were discovered by observing that cathode rays were deflected in the presence of electric or magnetic fields. By observing how much the rays bent in response to fields of specific strengths, scientists were able to infer that cathode rays were actually beams of negatively charged particles which we now know are electrons, and they were able to measure a number of the properties of electrons.
people had theorized that matter was made of fundamental particles for a long time, the greeks discussed it. the actual discovery of atoms happened because scientists noticed that when you combined elements into simple compounds (like H2O, CO2, etc.) the proportions of weight of the elements were always small whole number ratios, like 1:2, which suggested that each element was made of particles with a consistent weight and compounds were combining these particles.
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