Monday 5th December

Even though the Universe, vast as it is, is mostly huge spaces of nothingness, the bits of stuff out there are pretty big.  Our own planet is smaller than some of the moons orbiting many larger planets.  And our own Sun, though burning brightly for millions of years (and a few more to come, we all hope) is tiny compared to some out there.  So what is all this stuff?  No-one is really sure where it all came from; maybe it has always been there.  The scientists tell us that everything is made of atoms, though they are far too small to see.  And even the most solid thing imaginable, an iron bar, is made up of billions of atoms.  And just as unbelievable they are not necessarily packed tightly up against each other but there is lots of nothingness between them too.  And even atoms aren’t the smallest things, each atom has a number of electrons and protons revolving around the nucleus, all held in place by that mysterious force gravity, almost replicating the Universe itself only far far smaller.

And that isn’t the end of it either.  Phycisists reckon that there are sub-atomic particles even smaller than the electrons and protons inside tiny atoms.  And every so often they discover or think they might have discovered evidence of even smaller sub-atomic particles.  The search for small stuff is almost as intense as the search for big stuff.

And the number of those electrons and protons inside atoms determine what the stuff actually is.  My memories of the Periodic Table are pretty vague, but Hydrogen only had one, and Oxygen had eight.  Chemistry is in essence the exchange of electrons and protons between atoms resulting in different chemical compositions.

And if you think there is a lot of stuff, even on this planet, let alone in the Solar System, as it is all made up of trillions of atoms – there ‘aint half a lot of stuff in the whole cosmos. The big questions are where did all this stuff come from, and why..