A is for Atom Suppose you took a cookie and cut it into little
pieces, and then you cut those pieces into crumbs and those
crumbs into littler and littler crumbs, and so on. Would you
ever get to a point where it became impossible--no matter how
good your knife, your hand, or your eyes--to cut any further?
Would you ever reach the smallest possible piece of cookie? Or
could you keep dividing it into smaller and smaller cookie
bits...forever? The ancient Greek philosophers wondered about
things like this. One fellow, Democritus, said that all matter
(that's what scientists call the "stuff" of the world) was made
of tiny bits. He called these bits atoms, from the Greek word
for "not cuttable." He believed the bits were put together in
different ways to make different kinds of matter. Another
philosopher, Aristotle, didn't think matter came in bits. He
thought it all flowed together, like water running through your
fingers. Well, it turns out that Democritus was right. But it
took many more centuries for scienti