 At this point we are going to start talking about pieces of the atom, I just want to refresh your memory in that these little circles here were my cartoon drawings of atoms so these are individual atoms and what I'm going to show you on the next slide once we start talking about pieces of the atom is we are going to zoom in to one of these circles so pretend that all of the others go away and we are basically zooming in and looking at the inside of this circle so that's what's shown on the next slide so the title of this is the atom it's not just a big ball or a big circle the atom is made of three particles so particle is just a fancy word for little parts but scientists for whatever reason prefer to use the word particles here are the names of the three particles you're going to need to know them atoms are made of a particle called a proton they're also made of particles called electrons and another particle the third particle is called a neutron and I'm going to describe these in detail one by one to you throughout the next collection of videos so in my cartoon version of drawing protons electrons and neutrons the protons are going to be these red colored circles so they have a certain size and they are red colored the neutrons are going to be the same size circle except they're going to be gray colored so keep that in mind and then the electrons are going to be smaller circles and they're going to be blue colored small and blue and the colors are just random I just sort of picked them for no good reason the sizes of the atoms and where they're located however are not quite so random so the idea here is that the protons and the and the neutrons so protons are the red ones neutrons they're roughly the same size which is why I'm drawing relatively identical identically sized circles for the red and gray ones the electrons are smaller than the other two so they're going to be drawn as smaller circles the other thing is that on the previous slide let's go back to the previous slide for a second remember I said that we're zooming in on just one of these atoms so this circle is one particular type of atom and here we are zoomed in onto that circle so this was originally one of those atoms on the previous slide except we zoomed in and look to see what was inside of it what was at the very center were the protons and neutrons so another thing to know protons and neutrons are at the center more or less the center of the atom that center has a fancy name it's called the nucleus I don't care that you know that but you can impress people at cocktail parties by using that word the electrons are not at the center you can think of them as sort of orbiting around the center the they're not really orbiting around the center but that's probably the easiest way to think about them and a lot of times it's drawn that way so there you have it protons and neutrons in the center electrons kind of orbiting around the electrons are smaller and the protons and neutrons are roughly the same size so that's a fair amount of information to know at the moment you might want to write that down although some of it will be shown on the next slide there's more information that I'm going to show you the protons these red guys have an electrical charge now what an electrical charge is is sort of difficult to explain I just want you to realize that basically they have some feature which I'm going to call electrical charge and in particular that feature is considered to be positive and I will explain by contrasting the electrical charge or a proton with the electrical charge of an electron the electron has a negative electrical charge so the idea here is that the proton and the electron both have an electrical charge but they are opposite of each other so if you're not familiar with electricity and you're not familiar with magnets some of you may be some of you may not be the idea is I'm going to draw positive electrical charge with a little plus sign and a negative electrical charge with a with a minus sign when you have two things that have opposite electrical charges opposite charges they kind of get pulled toward each other they're attracted to each other so under some circumstances the electron because it has a negative electrical charge and the proton which has a positive electrical charge they're a little bit attracted to each other if you have two things that have identical electrical charges like if imagine I had two protons they both have identical positive charges they're repelled by each other a little bit they if you try to push them together they are going to be repelled at least a little bit and the same thing is true if you have two things with negative electrical charges so if you have two identical electrons which I'm drawing here and you try to push them together they will be repelled by each other there's some something about this thing which we call electricity which pushes identically charged things away from each other and attracts oppositely charged things toward each other so again just to summarize the protons have something called an electrical charge which is positive the electrons have something called an electrical charge which is negative which means protons and electrons are at some level attracted to each other neutrons are considered the reason they have this name is they are electrically neutral and neutral is just a fancy way of saying that they have no electrical charge so neutrons are not really attracted to protons and they're not really repelled by them neutrons are also not really attracted to electrons and they're not really repelled by them they have no charge so again a lot of information on this on this slide I'm telling you how big the particles are protons and neutrons are about the same size electrons are smaller then there's this weird thing called electrical charge the protons have something called positive electrical charge the electrons have something called a negative electrical charge and the neutrons are called electrically neutral which means they have no electrical charge so a lot to keep under your belt on this slide here is a table summarizing some of the stuff that I showed you so in this column there's the name of the particle in this column there's the size and you may think that I'm being a little cute by saying that the proton is very tiny and the neutron is also very tiny but I picked this to tell you that they are roughly the same size so if you think of the proton as being a ball basically the the width of the proton as a ball is about 8.7 times 10 to the negative 16 meters so that's pretty small there was a time in my life when I felt that this number was important to know it isn't really all I want you to know is that the proton is very tiny and the neutron is roughly the same size and then again I'm not really being super cutesy here I just want to keep it simple the electron is even tinier so it's less than 1 times 10 to the negative 22 meters wide but as far as you are concerned you should just realize that it's much smaller the electron is much smaller than protons and neutrons and keep it keep it that simple next column is the electrical charge which we talked about the proton has an electrical charge of something called 1.602 times 10 to the negative 19 coulombs you don't need to know what a coulomb is you don't need to know this number as far as we are concerned the proton has an electrical charge of plus one let's just keep it at that I said the neutron has no electrical charge so it's typically written as having a charge of zero and the electron has an electrical charge of negative 1.602 times 10 to the negative 19 coulombs which is the opposite of the charge of a proton so what people usually do since they are identical opposite charges as people say the proton has a charge of plus one the electron has a charge of negative one and they keep it at that and that's all I want you to know I want you to know that I want you to think of the proton is having a charge of plus one neutron is having a charge of zero and electron is having a charge of negative one don't worry about this coulomb thing okay and then as far as the mass is concerned which I am informally calling the weight the mass of the proton is very little you don't need to know this number but it's there just in case you think it's interesting the mass of the neutron is almost identical in fact the way that it's written here it is identical but they're slightly different from each other the neutron is slightly has a slightly higher mass and then as far as we are concerned the electron weighs much much less so that's all I want you to know I want you to know that the proton and neutron weigh about the same or they have about the same mass and the electron has a mass which is much much less and that is it for this particular introduction to the pieces of the atom which are known as the particles or atomic particles we will go into detail about protons neutrons and electrons one by one in separate videos