Here are some facts of the matter. Fun Old School Facts still alive and well and living In the subatomic substance !
These were listed over 150 years ago regarding the divisibility of matter, before the atom was actually shown to contain smaller particles of matter. But it must have been known...
Taken from an 1869 publication on various branches of physics-
"Matter has been divided into into parts incredibly minute. With proper instrament ten thousand distinct parallel lines can be drawn on a smooth surface an inch in width. So minute are these lines that they can not be seen without a microscope, not even a scratch being visible to the naked eye."
"A grain of musk will diffuse a perceptible odor through an apartment for twenty years. It does this by filling the air with particles of its substance. But so inconceivably minute are these particles, that, if the musk is weighed at the end of twenty years, no loss of weight can be detected."
"A grain of copper dissolved in nitric acid will impart a blue color to three pints of water. Each separable particle of water must conatin a portion of the grain of copper, -which is thus, it has been computed, divided into no less thatn 100,000,000 parts. "
"The spiders web is so attenuated that a sufficient quantity of it to go around the earth would only weigh eight ounces; and yet this minute thread consists of about a thousand separate filaments."
"Blood is composed of small red globules floating in a colorless liqud. Of these globules, every drop of human blood contains at least a million. Minute as they are, they may be divided into globules much more minute. As we descend in the scale of creation, we come to animals whose whole bodies are no larger than these little globules of human blood, yet possess all the organs necessary to life. How inconceivably small are the vessels through which the fluids of their bodies must circulate! "
"The microscope reveals to us wonders of animal life that are almost incredible. It shows us in duck-weed animalcules so small that it would take ten thousand millions of them to equal the size of a hemp-seed. In a single drop of ditch-water, it exhibits myriads of moving creatures. The mineral called tripoli is formed of these animalcules fossilized or turned into stone; and it has been shown that the fortieth part of a cubic inch of this mineral contains the bodies of no less than a thousand million animalcules- or more than all the human beings on the globe."
And a few side notes here from the 21st century.
Okay, yes, animalcule is still a word today.
1000 million is 1 billion. And today our souces say there are 8.3 billion people on the globe, or over 8000 million people. This indicates that if 150 years ago there were less that 1000 million people on the globe as our fun fact tells us, ...
"the fortieth part of a cubic inch of this mineral contains the bodies of no less than a thousand million animalcules- or more than all the human beings on the globe."
then either the world population has increased by over 8 times, or the methods of determining populations on the 19th century were questionable, or...
But, 150 years ago the population of the entire United States was, 31, 443,321, about 31 million. As of Janualry 2025 the population of just California is 39.5 million.
In 2010 U.S. population is shown as 308,745,538.
I guess the atoms and particles of the cosmos just keep on dividing as they have been doing since ...in the beginning.
