ATOM

Hold a grain of sand and you’re holding about 10²⁰ atoms. But almost none of an atom’s mass comes from its particles. About 99% of it is energy: the energy of the strong force, locked inside every proton and neutron. This film travels from a grain of sand down to the quarks. Along the way it visits the electron cloud, the tiny nucleus, and the four forces that hold everything together. Every visual is built from glowing particles and kept as accurate as possible. Where something has to be enlarged or exaggerated to be visible, the film says so on screen. Chapters 0:00 A grain of sand 0:48 The electron cloud 2:11 The nucleus 3:37 Inside the proton: quarks and 99% energy 5:23 The strong force 6:37 The weak force 7:42 The Higgs field 8:37 Electromagnetism and gravity 9:35 The four forces 10:12 Back to the grain of sand Key facts from the film A proton’s three quarks make up only about 1% of its mass. The rest is energy, through E = mc². The strong force holds on with about 16 tonnes, however far you pull. A free neutron decays in about 15 minutes on average. The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. Between two protons, gravity is weaker than the electric force by a factor of about a trillion trillion trillion. Animated and rendered in Blender (Cycles). #physics #atom #quarks #science #particlephysics