Last week, I dubbed Saturday's as chemistry novel days. Here's a continuation from last week.
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But waves of hot air expanding out from the burner soon pushed me back in the opposite direction. Once or twice I did a loopty-loop like a roller coaster. Then I was like a plane veering from side-to-side between tall skyscrapers, which turned out to be Mike, April, and Wade. In fact, I seemed to be on a direct course for Wade’s nostril, which was quickly reaching the proportions of an upside down Grand Canyon.
I’m afraid his nose didn’t look much like a nose, not by the time I reached it. I seem to remember something about a “cell” in biology class. Wade’s nose looked like egg carton after egg carton, full of eggs you could see through, with a ball of yolk in the middle, except of course they weren’t yellow. I might have plunged into the liquidish sea of a nose cell if Wade was not inhaling at the time, and I quickly wafted off further into the canyon.
It soon became very dark, and I could not tell if I was moving or not. Would my flight never come to an end? I wondered how many miles I must have traveled by that time. There was the occasional meteor shower of light falling through the darkness. But they seemed oh so far away.
It was all rather empty, and I began to wonder what I might do for air. How would the little bits of oxygen get in my nose, when I must surely be getting close to the size of oxygen?
Perhaps someone heard my concern, for very soon I found myself coming closer and closer to something—or perhaps it was two somethings. I seem to recall Mr. Atkinson saying once upon a time that oxygens liked to travel in pairs, so I became hopeful. Perhaps I will be able to breathe somehow if I am at least near oxygen, I said to myself.
What I saw was hard to describe. At first, it looked rather like two eye balls looking straight at me with rather extravagant lashes. Not only did the poor pair of oxygen atoms have a uni-brow above the eyeballs, but underneath as well, with two other lashes branching out on the outside like cat whiskers. In fact, the closer I got, I realized that two lashes were pointing straight out of the eyeball toward me!
Time must still have been slowing down for the things around me, for soon the solid lights of the oxygens became fuzzy lights with the occasional bit of lightning in the cloud. Thankfully, I was not headed for any of the lashes. But I had spun straight toward one of the eyeballs.
It occurred to me that I could get rather singed if one of those flashes of light were to hit me. There were only two fuzzy lights toward the inner part of the eyeball, in a bit of a sphere. I was quite relieved to make it inside them without encountering one of those flashes of light!
It suddenly dawned on me that these swirling, flashing bits of light did in fact remind me of electricity, and I tried to exclaim exuberantly, “Electrons!” But nothing came out of my mouth since there was no air to carry sound. It was quite unlike me to remember something about chemistry, and so I was very excited. I even looked around to see if anyone might have noticed my silent lips move. Perhaps some excellent lip reader lurking in the middle of an oxygen atom might silently congratulate me on my great insight. Unfortunately, no one seemed to notice.
What was it Mr. Atkinson said was in the middle of an atom? Was it a nucleus? Or was a nucleus in the middle of a cell? Wait, maybe both were called a “nucleus.” Right now it seemed rather more like a bunch of emptiness. Perhaps Mr. Atkinson was wrong. After all, he had never been to the middle of an atom. I would have to tell him what nonsense he was teaching when I got back. Surely I was quickly becoming more an expert on chemistry than he was!
But a moment later, I did spot something rather large looming on the horizon. It made me think of a cluster of grapes. I could only see one side of the bunch, but there were clearly at least a dozen grapes. I wondered to myself what they might taste like. I would surely need a snack before long. Shrinking is hard work!
What did Troy call them? Clavicles? No, that wasn’t right. My little sister broke her clavicle once, and I am quite sure that it was not shaped anything of the sort. Particles -- that was it! These were particles. There were electrons, protons, and neutrons in an atom. I was quite sure of it. The electrons swirled or something around the outside of the nucleus -- I had thought like the planets around the sun. But now I could tell all the scientists of the world that they were more like eyeballs and lashes.
Then the nucleus was in the middle, with a cluster of grapes called “protons” and “neutrons.” Of course they did not really look like grapes, but I wouldn’t know how else to describe them.
The grapes in the nucleus each seemed at least a thousand times bigger than the fuzzy electron swirls in orbit, maybe almost two thousand times bigger! It was all very strange, and I wondered who would design such a bizarre collection of grapes and eye lashes. I would certainly pay more attention to Mr. Atkinson if I ever returned to my larger state!
My spinning had nearly stopped when it appeared that one of the grapes in the center of the atom had a window on it. Indeed, I could see people moving around inside.
No, wait. It was more like a garage you would drive into. I was headed right for it and, to my surprise, the swivel chair stopped spinning exactly in front of the counter of what looked to be a diner of sorts.
“We’re not a diner or a chippy, love,” a woman behind the counter said in what seemed to me a peculiar kind of English accent. “We’re a café. Big difference. Most of the people what come in here are misguided physicists whose experiments go wonky. We have far too many upper end to be a chippy, love.”
“It’s true,” I heard a squeaky voice come from somewhere nearby. And, sure enough, there was a tiny man not more than an inch high sitting on a swivel chair on top of the counter next to me. As for me, I had to give credit to Mike and Wade for spinning me almost just right. I was only a little oversized for the café, with my head reaching to about a foot from the ceiling. I was certainly the tallest person in the diner.
“This is the Nuclear Café, I’ll have you know,” the woman continued, “not a diner! We’ve served dozens of very important customers here since Einstein a hundred years ago. Everyone thinks he came up with relativity in the Patent Office, but the truth is that he had a bit of a mishap one day in 1905 with a Tesla coil and some uranium 235.”
“I’m sorry,” I interjected. “I don’t know what any of those things are, although I have heard of Einstein. E = mc2, right?”
“Exactly, love. It’s I what taught him that. Don’t worry. Einstein didn’t know what had happened to him either.”
“Excuse me,” a man interrupted with an Italian accent. He looked shrunk to about four feet tall, and I must have been twice his size. “Could Madame and I have two more pions?” he said.
Two quarks, up and anti-down,” she shouted back into the kitchen through an open window where the cook placed the orders.
“Sorry,” the man quickly added, “but I’d like down and anti-up, and I feel quite confident that Madame would rather have down and anti-down.” And with that he returned to a table on the edge of the emptiness, where an older woman was sitting. He was mumbling something under his breath about how Yukawa never messed up his order.
“That’s Fermi,” the lady behind the counter said. “He’s a picky one. Everyone thinks radiation killed him and Madame as well. Truth is, it only shrunk ’em.
“So what would you like to order, mum?” she continued.
I’m not quite sure where to begin,” I said. “I’ve come here looking for some interesting atoms. You know, E=mc2 stuff.”
“Well that’s about as clear as Heisenberg,” the lady said. “We do plenty of E = mc2 here, but we’re not really in the atom business. We do the smaller particles—electrons, quarks, you know.”
“No, ma’am. I’m afraid I don’t know. I thought there were just electrons, protons, and neutrons.”
Really?” she said with a noticeable tone of disgust.
Well, we do have protons and neutrons, but you’ll have to go out on the back lot with Feynman to see ’em.”
"Who's Feynman," I asked.
Why he’s the cook. The best subatomic cook we’ve ever seen in these particles.”
“So you don’t sell atoms here?”
“No, love. We’re inside a neutron after all. Even hydrogen would take a tonne of football fields. Now Rutherford down the road makes a fine hydrogen, although he messes up most everything else. Bohr isn’t too bad with smaller atoms, but if you want the bigger ones, especially the really interesting ones, you’ll have to go to Schrodie’s.”
“What about Dalton’s?” came a squeaky voice from somewhere. Ah, it was the inch tall man on the counter. I had forgotten him.
I’ve told you a thousand times,” barked the lady behind the counter. “Dalton’s went out of the atom making business almost two hundred years ago. He only trades molecules these days.”
It was all very confusing to be sure. I was quite certain now that Mr. Atkinson had said an atom was made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. And I thought the electrons were like little planets circling the large sun of the nucleus.
“That’s a good place to start, love,” said the woman behind the counter, once again reading my thoughts. “But it turns out they is not the most basic building blocks of all, and the electrons are more like clouds of mystery than little planets. You never know exactly where they’re at, although you can make some fine guesses.”
They ain’t nowhere 'til you look at 'em,” barked someone in the corner, and with that an argument broke out in the café about whether electrons really had a position or not. “Not until the waveform collapses!” she heard someone shout.
A quirky smile came over the woman behind the counter. “Gets ’em going every time.”
"So,” I finally said with some hesitation, “what should I do now?”
“To be honest, love, you’ll need to go back to the beginning,” she said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the universe. Which, apparently, it was. “No sense poking around quarks and leptons when you’ve barely sorted your atoms.”
“But I don’t see how I’m ever going to get back to class,” I protested, feeling quite like a lost sock in a cosmic dryer.
“No, not that beginning,” she said, waving her hand as though swatting a fly. “The beginning of chemistry, dear. You’ve skipped half the story and jumped straight into the footnotes.”
For a moment, my spirits drooped like a wet paper towel. Surely I knew something—at least enough not to be scolded by a woman living inside a neutron.
“It’s nothing to fret about,” she said kindly. “Just pop through those doors. There’s a briefing starting now. Very informative, except when it isn’t. It's the place to start if you want to find those interesting atoms you're looking for."
Little did I know I was about to receive far more "briefing" than I really wanted -- and with a strangely familiar crew. But with nothing better to do, I slid off the chair and marched toward the double doors with a sigh of resignation.
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