MATTER AND ITS PROPERTIES I
This page deals with the most important aspects of ‘matter and its properties’. It is a concise but not comprehensive study meant to bring a shine to your grades. For a more comprehensive study material and names of textbooks, click here.
PARTICLE NATURE OF MATTER
‘Matter’ is anything that occupies space and has mass. Most of the things we see around us (and some which we cannot even see, such as clean air) come in the category of matter. ‘Matter’ is made up of particles. This was suspected from ancient times as things could be broken and progressively made smaller. Various perceptions about what kind of particles make up the matter were there but there was no way to conclusively prove them. At the start of the nineteenth century, however, the indirect evidence of constituents of matter began to be understood and it took little time for it to be compiled to derive the combined meaning of the pieces of evidence. The credit for this goes to the chemists of that era and the names like Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Proust, John Dalton, Gay Lussac, and Amedeo Avogadro are at the forefront when the earliest developments in the modern Chemistry are talked about.
So, the efforts of the above scientists and some further developments in characterizing the particles of which matter is made up of led to the following important results:
All matter is made up of particles. These particles can be atoms, molecules, or ions.
So, whenever you read the word, ‘particle’, it is self-evident that it is either an atom or a molecule or an ion. The context of the paragraph may make it more clear which particle of the above three types is being talked about.
However, all the above three particles have some common properties. They all possess energy. It includes two major kinds of energy: one is potential energy (which is the energy due to their position) and the other is kinetic energy (which energy due to motion).
The study and analysis of properties of matter at bulk scale resulted in its particle nature being discovered and you will see that knowledge of particle nature helps is predicting the properties of matter at bulk scale.
Now, test your knowledge by answering 5 short-answer questions
Particle nature of matter
