Course: Electronics — for Complete Beginners

Section 2: Some Fundamental Physics

Lecture 1: The Structure of Matter

The Structure of Matter

In the beginning, the cosmics thought
about creating the universe — the heavens
and the earth and a bunch of other
interesting things.
But what to make it out of? Hmm…
That was a problem, because at that point
there was nothing but nothingness — a void
filled with darkness.
So they first set about the task of creating
some building materials … some basic
elements which, they thought, could be
combined in different ways to come up with
all sorts of wondrous compounds and
mixtures.
They gave the elements catchy names like
hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and
iron, copper, silver and gold.
 That was fun so far, but other than that,
these elements weren’t very interesting. And
they weren’t all that useful either.
To make them more interesting and useful,
they did two things.
First they changed the design, so that each
element would be made up of tiny little
particles, arranged with a blob in the middle,
and a cloud of other ones flying around and
around it in space.
Next, they invented heat.
Depending on how hot the things got, they
could make the elements high energy, or
not, changing them from hard, to gooey, to
runny, and even to invisible!
Then to keep the things from flying apart,
they invented charge, and a law that unlike
charges would attract.
They then gave some of the particles in the
middle blob a positive charge, and called
them protons.
 The particles flying around in orbit were
given a negative charge to keep them
attracted to the protons … just enough to
balance their kinetic energy, which kept
them from flying off into space. These were
called “negatrons” until 1891, when an
Irishman named George Stoney talked
everyone into calling them electrons.
That was probably a good thing, since
we’d otherwise have to call this a course in
“Basic Negatronics.” That would sound like
a course in how to be a party-pooper!
This is all just some interesting
background information. Don’t worry about
it. You don’t have to become a theologian or
nuclear physicist in order to understand
electronics. It just leads up to what we’re
really interested in, which is …
 Electric Current
So, we’ve learned that the smallest particle
of an element is the atom. And atoms are
made of up several sorts of particles, the
main three being protons, neutrons and
electrons.
Structurally, the protons and neutrons
form a nucleus at the center of the atom,
with the electrons revolving around that in
free space.
The atoms of each element are distinctive
in that they differ in the number and
distribution of these basic particles.

The hydrogen atom, for example, has only

one of each: one proton and one neutron in
its nucleus, with only a single orbital
electron. The oxygen atom has eight of each
particle.
When atoms have a lot of electrons, those
orbital particles usually have different
energy levels, and they arrange themselves
in an orderly way around the nucleus
accordingly.
As shown for the oxygen atom, the higher
energy level electrons are more loosely
bound, and orbit at greater distances from
the nucleus.
Compounds occur when different kinds of
atoms are joined together by the sharing of
these outer-shell electrons. Water happens
when two hydrogen atoms link up with a
single oxygen atom; “H2O” in other words:
 Solid substances are formed when
identical atoms arrange themselves in the
same way, which results in a very organized
three-dimensional sort of lattice structure.

This is what the copper atom looks like in

3D, with twenty-nine orbital electrons
arranged in four shells …
 The outer shell electrons travel at the
highest energy level of any others in the
electron cloud. They are still subject to the
forces of attraction imposed by the positive
charges in the nucleus, but not as strongly as
their inner-shell brothers.
This is why they’re able to swap places
with electrons in adjacent atoms, which, in
combination with nature’s penchant for
balancing forces, results in the orderly
lattice structure.
But, what’s more interesting is that with a
little bit of encouragement, it’s possible to
cause these outer shell electrons to flow
through the material in a controlled way, as
if they were actually free.
That never really happens, of course, since
nature abhors imbalances.
With an electron flow from west to east,
for example, an east-going electron from
any particular atom will be replaced by one
arriving from the west.
 This flow of electrons is called an electric
current. Its journey is always circular,
beginning and ending at the same place,
within what’s called a circuit. The integrity
of the conducting material is thereby
maintained, even while we are able to use its
free electrons to do useful things as an
electric current.
The technology of exploiting atomic
structures in this way is called …
… electronics.
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