Question: Have you found an element in your walks? If so, what was it?

Luke Humphrey answered on 14 Mar 2022:

Thanks Ethan, this is a really good question. The simple answer is yes, since everything in the universe is made from elements. I will try to answer more clearly:

Elements are atoms of different “flavours”.

The word “atom” is greek for “can’t be cut”. In the ancient world, people coined the term as an idea: if you break something down into its components, and then break those components into their components, and so on: do you get to the point where you can’t break things down any further, where the components “can’t be cut”? They called these “atoms”, but they didn’t know if they existed or not at the time.

Later on, we thought we had discovered the smallest form of matter and we called them “atoms” after the old idea. Nowadays, we know that even “atoms” are made of even smaller components: which we call “sub-atomic” particles: the neutrons, protons, and electrons. About 100 years ago, we found out that even these sub-atomic particles are made from smaller components! This is the world of quantum physics, which I won’t go into here.

So, to recap: atoms are made from protons, neutrons, and electrons. It turns out that the number of protons in an atom determine how a material made from that atom will behave, while the number of neutrons or electrons doesn’t make that much of a difference. People called atoms with different numbers of protons “elements”, starting with Hydrogen (1 proton), Helium (2 protons) and onwards.

Everything is made from atoms, and “elements” are the “flavour” of atoms. On our scale, we don’t see individual atoms, because they’re so small, we just see the materials that make them up. However, you can see them with very powerful microscopes. What we find is you very rarely find very pure elements. Most materials are made from a mixture of different elements.

For example, water as a liquid is just lots of water molecules, you can think of this like a ball pit except the balls are so small you can’t even see between them. Each molecule is composed of three atoms, bound very tightly so that you would need a lot of energy to break them apart. There are two hydrogens (H2) and one oxygen (O) so we call it H2O. In a glass of water, you have two different elements in the water, and plenty of different elements in the glass too.

Finding elements on their own is very rare. Even something like aluminium foil that you might have in the kitchen is probably an alloy made from a few elements. We just call it “aluminium foil” because aluminium is the main ingredient. Steel is a commonly used alloy which combines mainly iron and carbon.

I hope this all explains why your original question is quite hard to answer! However, I’ll try:

I see lots of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in the people, animals and plants, and even in the air. There’s plenty of hydrogen and oxygen in water, whether that’s in my bottle of water or in the clouds. If someone smiles I see the calcium in their teeth. Rocks are a good source of some less common elements, and if you go to the beach you’ll see plenty of sodium-chloride (salt) in the water, which is another two elements (sodium and chlorine) right there. To be clear, I can’t see these elements any more than you can, but I know they’re there because I’ve read about what different things are made from.

I see on your profile that your dream job is RAF engineer, so for that you would need to know about the elements that compose the materials you’re using. For example, steel is very strong but also heavy, because it uses carbon and iron which are both quite heavy elements. With planes, especially warplanes, you need to reach a balance between using strong materials that are light enough to get into the air!

The reason some elements are heavier than others is because of the atoms having more neutrons and protons. If you have a block of iron and a block of lead of the same size, each has a similar number of atoms because atoms like to stay roughly the same distance apart regardless of element. The lead ways more because the atoms themselves have more protons and neutrons in them, with each adding a tiny bit more mass – but since many many many atoms make up a material, it all adds up!