Question: why are you so interested in atoms ?

Ben Cropper answered on 13 Mar 2020:

Basically because we still don’t know how they really work! Science always looks for natural stuff that humans don’t understand. Atoms are difficult because they have too many particles to do all the maths exactly (it gets really hard to do calculations on interactions between more than 2 things) and not enough particles to do statistics with it. Because of this, we have simpler models that we use (for example, we might imagine that the nucleus sometimes behaves a bit like a drop of liquid) that we have test under which circumstances they work. Models are always improving, especially as computers get better!