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Asked by anon-244324 to Ondrej, Jordan, Eleanor, Ed on 19 Mar 2020.
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Jordan McElwee answered on 19 Mar 2020:
Because a knife is too big! (Sorry for the awful joke).
There are a few answers to this question. Physicists have been said to ‘split the atom’, which means they worked out what was inside it. In an atom there are protons, neutrons and electrons, and we can remove various parts of this (while it also happens naturally too). We can remove electrons from the atom in a process called ionisation, and big chunks of protons and neutrons can be removed (from large atoms) via nuclear fission (which releases a lot of energy).
But let’s go one step further. Protons and neutrons are actually made up of something else, called quarks. We can’t really remove quarks from inside the protons and neutrons (well, we could, but it would be very very hard and you wouldn’t be left with a single quark!) due to a process called colour confinement.
So in answer to your question – atoms can’t really be cut as they are far too small, but we can remove parts from them if we try really hard!
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Edward Banks answered on 19 Mar 2020:
You sort of can- this is what happens in nuclear fission! Often you need enough incoming energy to overcome the energy that binds the nucleus of the atom together. If you can provide enough energy, usually in the form of bombardment by neutrons, the the atom will split apart into smaller atoms. As this happens, they release a large amount of energy, which can be harnessed in nuclear power plants!
However, some unstable nuclei can split of their own accord, into smaller more stable nuclei. -
Eleanor Jones answered on 19 Mar 2020:
I suppose you kind of can; splitting atoms is possible. But it is not really something that is possible to control perfectly, i.e. you can’t slice an atom exactly in half, not like you could a cake or something.
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Ondrej Kovanda answered on 19 Mar 2020:
Who said you can’t! More or less everything has been already mentioned here, let me just point out one peculiarity. The word ‘atom’ comes from Greek for ‘unsplittable’. The ancient Greeks believed that matter is composed of tiny, further undivisible bits, and called them atoms. When the atoms were, about two thousand years later actually observed, the name kind of stuck. Today, however, we already know that not only we can split the atoms, they do it by themselves spontaneously too.
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