The second week in technology was about atoms because our first unit is about lasers and the laser cutter technology in the room. The first lesson is about the universe and its size.

During our lesson we discussed how the universe is both impossibly big and impossibly small mostly because we have nothing to compare the universe to so it could be incredibly big or incredibly small. We talked about the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts and their missions to see the farthest ends of the universe. We learned the history of Voyager, its missions and capabilities, its speed and its purpose along with how far it has traveled.

During this very captivating lesson, we also talked about light. Light is a particle AND wave quantified as photons. Each particle travels 5.8 trillion miles in a year. We also talked about how this means that light, in a way, can be envisioned, (pun intended), as a “delay” in that it is basically a time machine because since light takes time to reach our eyes. Therefore, we can see things that happened in our universe a long time ago.

We then began to talk about the elements and atoms. Atoms are made of smaller bits called protons, neutrons and electrons. Electrons are the ones on the outside floating around in cloud-like shells. Protons are found in the nucleus and they are “solid crunchy bits”.

This tied back to our question of the scale of the universe because we started talking about the scale of atoms. Mr. Calvert asked us that if we had an enlarging ray how big would we need to make a grapefruit sized ball of atoms to see the individual atoms. I guessed the sun, but it turned out to be the size of the earth, so much smaller than I guessed. He then asked us how big would the atoms be. The answer was the size of a blueberry. Now that we knew the size of the atoms he asked how big would we have to make the atoms to be able to see the nucleus. And the answer was the size of a marble, and this answered the question of how tiny atoms really are. We then began to learn more about individual elements and learned the Periodic Table Song.

In summary, our second week’s first lesson was interesting, fun, and helped me better understand concepts that I had studied before out of curiosity just for fun in a new way. The topics were fascinating!