The life of an atom: a complete journey through quantum mechanics

Chapter 1: Where the story begins

Shortly after the "Big Bang" 13.7 billion years ago the first atom was spawned into existence. As the hot, dense and vastly empty new universe started to cool itself down (this took about 300 000 year), conditions started to became more suitable, around 3000° Celsius, 5432° Fahrenheit or 3273.15° Kelvins. This made it possible for the creation of fundamentals that makes up roughly about 5% of the universe. Some of these fundamentals includes, quarks and electrons, the other 95% being something that we know very little about, dark energy and dark matter. This is because with our current day technology, we are unable to detect or even see dark energy and dark matter. Anyways, eventually quarks started to combine with each other to create our subatomic particle, Protons and Neutrons. Protons are the things within the nucleus (center) of the atom which helps to determine which element from the periodic table the atom is. Just like the Protons, the Neutrons are also located within the nucleus, and helps to keep the atom from becoming too unstable. If an atom is too unstable, they're able to explode in a highly life threatening nuclear reaction, if conditions are right. The only thing located outside of the nucleus is the electrons. The electrons are essential as they helps the atom to form bonds with one another, creating a molecule. To form a bond, the electrons are either shared or transferred between the two or more atoms, to create something called a molecule. A molecule can either be formed from 1 of the three types of bonds, covalent, ionic, or metallic bond. A covalent bond is a bond that is formed with a non mettle and a mettle element, in which the electrons are shared between the two elements. A metallic bond is pretty much self explanatory through its name, as it can only be formed with two metallic elements. This allows the electrons to be delocalised (free moving), which is how electricity [1] is able to be conducted and moves around to power things like our electronics, house and most of our planets. Lastly an ionic bond is made up of two non mettle elements, where the electrons are transferred from one atom to the other, depending on which one is closer to completing their octet (having a full outer shell to keep them from being reactive). While subatomic particles makes up atoms, they're not the smallest particles that we know of today. Quarks are even smaller and makes up the subatomic particles (protons and neutrons), which we'll be exploring in depth in a later chapter.

[1] Note that the flow of electricity or current can be calculated by using the either i= q/t or ∆v=w/q

i = current (opposite to the flow of electrons)
q = electric charge (flow of electron)
t = time
∆v = change in velocity (final velocity - initial velocity)
w = work (w=fs) →「f = force, s = distance」
∆ = change