THE INVISIBLE ATOM
THE INVISIBLE ATOM
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)
 
 “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that
things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” (Hebrews 11:3)
 
“For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the
 things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)
 
 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … All things were made by Him;
and without Him was not any thing made that was made.  In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:1, 3-4)
 
Introduction
     When God’s Word, the Bible, speaks it is never wrong, this includes scientific things.  Mere man on the other hand often calls falsehoods, science.  God’s Word commands us to avoid “… profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. …” (1 Timothy 6:20-21).
 
     Hebrews 11:3 states that “… things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”  Here it is clearly speaking of the building blocks of the Universe.  All visible matter consists of atoms, but unlike a molecule, a virus, or a bacteria, the atom cannot be seen, even under an electron microscope.  They cannot be seen, but are known to exist from over a hundred years of experimentation.  The atom is composed several invisible “things.”  The atom is made up of a nucleus which consists of protons and neutrons which are surrounded by a cloud electrons.  Electrons, muons and taus are types of leptons.  The protons and neutrons are made up of six types of quarks.  Quarks and leptons are believed to be the two basic constituents of matter.  These are the invisible “things” which make up the “things which are seen.” 
 
     The Lord Jesus Christ “… is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature:  For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:  And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” (Colossians 1:15-17)
 
     Creation demands a design, and a design demands a designer and deep down inside man knows it.  “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.  For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:  Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” (Romans 1:19-20)   God revealed to the Prophet Daniel that at “… the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” (Daniel 12:4)   The discovery of the invisible atom and its components, and what its for is one of many signs that we are in “the time of the end” now.  God is omniscient and knows the past, present and the future, and He know all true science.  He is the one who created time, space, and matter and the one who set it all in motion. 
 
Development of Atomic Theory
 
     Atomism is the belief that everything is made up of a few simple parts. It dates at least as far back as the 400’s BC.  The Greek philosopher Leucippus founded the idea, but his student, Democritus, named the atom, and he developed the hypothesis further.  The Greek philosopher Aristotle rejected Atomism, so the theory was not very popular.  The idea did survive, however.  During the 1500’s and 1600’s such founders of modern science as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Galileo believed in the theory of Atomism.  In 1750, Rudjer Boscovich, an eastern Europian scientist, suggested that Democritus might have been wrong in believing that atoms are “uncuttable” (this is the meaning of the word atom).1    Boscovich believed that atoms contained smaller parts, which in turn contained still smaller parts, and so on down to the fundamental building blocks of matter.  He felt that these building blocks must be geometric points with no size at all.  Now most atomic physicists accept a modern form of this idea. 
 
     With the advancement of chemistry to an exact science in the late 1700’s atomic theory advanced greatly.  It was discovered that compounds could be formed only by combining elements in certain fixed proportions according to their mass.  In 1803, British chemist John Dalton proposed that each element consists of a particular kind of atom and that the varying properties of the element result from differences in their atoms. 
Dalton
further suggested that that all atoms of a given element are identical in size, shape, and mass.  In 1897, a British physicist named John Thompson discovered that atoms are “cuttable.”  Thompson determined, after studying rays traveling between charged metal plates in a vacuum tube, that the rays consisted of light weight, negatively charged particles.  He thus discovered electrons.  In 1911, another British physicist, Emest Rutherford, a student of Thompson, after experiments of bombarding thin sheets of gold with alpha particles, declaired that nearly all the mass of an atom is concentrated in a tiny nucleus. 
Rutherford
also stated that the nucleus is surrounded by electrons traveling at tremendous speeds through the atom’s outer regions.  Most of the alpha particles passed through the sheets, showing that gold atoms must consist of empty space. 
Rutherford
’s theory did not explain the arrangement of the electrons in the atom.  However, in 1913, Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist who had worked with
Rutherford
, did explain that electrons could travel only in a certain set of orbits around the nucleus.  In 1924, the French physicist Louis de Broglie proposed that electrons have some properties of waves.  In 1914,
Rutherford
determined that protons, which had been discovered in the late 1800’s, must make up part of the nucleus.  In 1932, another British physicist, James Chadwick, discovered that the nucleus also contained uncharged particles, or neutrons.  Also during the 1930’s scientists developed particle accelerators capable of producing energies high enough to study the nucleus.  In 1938, scientists discovered that bombarding the nucleus of a uranium atom with a neutron caused the nucleus to split into two parts and release energy.  They called the process nuclear fussion which led to the discovery of the atomic bomb.2  
 
     Dr. Leon Lederman who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of new sub-atomic particles (pions, muons, neutrinos, gluons, lamdas, omegas, gravitons, and other parts of the atom) was asked the following question by George Caylor:  “How will you know when you’ve come to the particle that just can’t be broken apart any more?”  Lederman answered:  “When we get to the true ‘atom.’  That is what Democritus named the thing that cannot be broken apart. It is what everything is made of. … I believe everything is made of ‘quarks and leptons’ – the God Particle. The way the quarks and leptons are arranged and united by energy determines the function of the particle. … [Q]uarks and leptons … have no size at all. They have no dimension, no mass. They are what we physicists call ‘points.’  They exist, but have few material properties of existence.  But everything is made of them! … Quarks and leptons are infinitely small, but the energy that ties them together is large!  It takes billions of volts to break particles apart. The smaller we get, the greater the energy. … If it takes billions of volts to break particles apart, those particles have billions of volts of energy holding them together. … An atomic bomb uses less than 1% of its available energy. … [Matter feel solid] because the energy that holds it together is so powerful.  The actual matter in a table is smaller than a molecule. The quarks and leptons of the entire earth occupy an area smaller than a molecule. The matter in the entire universe was once smaller than a baseball. Everything is held together by energy.”3
 
The Trinity of Creation
 
     “For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)
 
     “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” (1 John 5:7)
 
     God’s Creation consists of time, space and matter.  It is a trinity, not composed partly of space, partly of matter, and partly of time.  “A trinity is not a trio or a triad, but a tri-unity, with each part comprising the whole, yet all three required to make the whole. Thus, the universe is all Space, all Time, and all Matter (including energy as a form of matter); in fact, many scientists speak of it as a Space-Time-Matter continuum.”4   Likewise all three components of the three parts of Creation are trinities:  Time consists past, present, and future.  “The future is the unseen source of time, manifest moment-by-moment in the present and understood in the past.”5  Space is comprised of three dimensions, depth, width and height with each dimension permeating all space.  “Matter is unseen, omnipresent energy, manifesting itself in various forms of measurable motion, then experienced in corresponding phenomena. For example, light energy generates light waves, which are experienced in the seeing of light. Sound energy generates sound waves which we experience when we hear sound.”6   Note the trinity of the Creation again:
 
          1. Space: Length, Width and Height.
          2. Time:  Past, Present and Future.
          3. Matter (Atoms): Energy, Motion and Phenomenon.
 
Genesis 1:1-5:  “In the beginning (Time) God created the heaven (Space) and the earth (Matter which is made of Atoms).   And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.  And God said, Let there be light (Subatomic Particles): and there was light.  And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.  And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day (Time).”
 
     The triune building blocks of the Universe were completed on Day One of Creation.
 
The Atom & It’s Components
 
     The Atom (Mass, Energy and Particles):
          1. The Neutron which is composed of three quark s.
          2. The Proton which is composed of three quarks.
          3. The Electron which is one of three kinds of subatomic lepton particles:   muon s, tau s and electron s.
 
     A quark is a generic type of physical particle that forms one of the two basic constituents of matter , the other being the lepton . Both quarks and leptons are sub-atomic particle and form two distinct families of fermions .
 
     Various species of quarks combine in specific ways to form protons and neutrons , in each case taking exactly three quarks to make the composite particle in question.  There are six different types of quark, usually known as flavors : up , down , charm , strange , top , and bottom . (Their names do not indicate anything about their properties, but were chosen arbitrarily based on the need to name them something that could be easily remembered and used.) The "up" and "down" varieties are abundant and are distinguished by (amongst other things) their electric charge.  It is this which makes the difference when quarks clump together to form protons or neutrons: a proton is made up of two "up quarks" and one "down quark”  while a neutron contains one "up quark" and two "down quarks.”
 
     There are three known flavors of lepton: the electron , the muon , and the tau .  Each is represented by a pair of particles called a weak doublet . One is a massive charged particle that bears the same name as its flavor (like the electron).  The other is a nearly massless neutral particle called a neutrino (such as the electron neutrino ).  All known charged leptons have a single unit of negative or positive electric charge (depending on whether they are particles or antiparticles) and all of the neutrinos and antineutrinos have zero electric charge.  7
 
NOTES & REFRENCES:
 
1.  ATOM, n.  [Gr.; L. atomus; from not, and to cut.]  A particle of matter so minute as to admit of no division.  Atoms are conceived to be the first principles or component parts of all bodies. (Webster’s 1828 Dictionary)
2.  The World Book Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, p. 840; World Book Inc., 1986.
4.  Morris, Henry, The Tri-Universe .
5.  Ibid.