What's smaller than the smallest - An Introduction
People have thought about the existence of particles smaller than the smallest sensible particles of matter from time immemorial. Moreover, a similar philosophy of ' anu ' is mentioned in the ancient Indian texts. However, this suspicion had no scientific grounds until one or two centuries ago. Now, we know that matter is composed of atoms, atoms of nucleons and electrons, and nucleons of quarks. The concept of an atom was first scientifically proposed by John Dalton, which was further developed by Ernest Rutherford and Neils Bohr, although J J Thomson was the first to propose a model after Dalton. While Thomson presented a model of atom in which the electrons are distributed in a positive space as if seeds in a watermelon or plums in a pudding, Rutherford's famous gold foil experiment proved that most of the space inside an atom is empty and that the positive charge is concentrated in a centre called nucleus, and thus proved Thomson to be incorrect. An interesting thing w