Solid, Liquid, Gas

We just learned a little about Light Bulbs.

Have you ever gone sledding in the snow?
What about swimming in a pool?
Have you ever seen water boil on a stove?
What about a bright neon sign for a store?

If so, then you've seen the four types of matter in our world:
solid, liquid, gas and plasma

(from: wikipedia - states of matter)

We see water all the time in three of the four types.
An ice cube is water when it's solid, and the steam that rises from boiling water is actually the water turning into a gas.
There are lots of types of solids made from things other than water,
like the dirt you walk on, or the chair you sit in.

Solids can turn to liquids when they get hotter, like lava is actually rock as a liquid!

Sometimes gases are really hot like steam from water,
but sometimes gases are just normal temperature like the air we breathe.

Plasma is what happens when a gas gets really hot, and when the parts of the gas get really full of energy, and whenever you see a bright neon sign, it's filled with plasma!

(from: wikipedia - neon sign)

Neutrons Protons & Electrons

We learned before about how small atoms are,
but there are even things smaller that that!

An atom is really made up of two parts.
The nucleus in the middle, and the electrons that spin around the nucleus.

(from: wikipedia - atom)


The nucleus can be made up of two types of things, protons and neutrons.

Remember we've talked about positive and negative?

The electrons have negative charges, the protons have positive charges,
and the neutrons have no charge at all.

Atom

We just learned about Binary.

What's the smallest thing you can think of?
A grain of sand?
A drop of water?

Well even smaller than any of those is something called an atom.

An atom is so small, that in one single grain of sand there aren't just millions,
billions or trillions of atoms, but quadrillions or quintillions of them!

A quintillion is a 1 with 18 zeroes after it: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

Atoms are the building blocks of our world, they make up every part of our bodies,
and every thing around us from the ground we stand on to the air we breathe.


(from: wikipedia - atom)