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Asked by elaw13 to Kate, Kieren, Nicola, Rowena, Roy on 7 Mar 2014.
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Kate Nicholson answered on 7 Mar 2014:
Yes and no. You can say that an atom can behave as a particle, but you can also say that an atom is made up of sub-atomic particles, both statements are true depending on what you mean by particle.
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Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 8 Mar 2014:
A particle means “a small unit”, whereas an atom is a much more precisely defined thing consisting of protons and neutrons in the middle and electrons surrounding in a big cloud. A particle can be a smaller thing like an electron or a bigger thing like a grain made up of many atoms.
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Nicola Rogers answered on 8 Mar 2014:
atoms are a type of particle, but not all particles are atoms…. the word particle is very general to mean anything that is very small
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Roy Adkin answered on 11 Mar 2014:
Well this question has been pretty much fully answered already so here’s a little trivia for you…
The word atom comes from the Greek ‘atomos’, which means ‘indivisible’. The ‘a’ bit means ‘not’ and ‘tomos’ comes from the word ‘temnō’ which means ‘I cut’. So that means that ‘atom’ means ‘I cannot cut’ in other words ‘that which cannot be divided further’. Of course we now know the atom can be broken up into smaller particles (quarks) but it’s fun to know where words come from 😉
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