ABSTRACT
The English word “atom” has been derived from the Greek
word “tomos”, which means “body”. Thus “a-tomos”
means something that does not have a body, meaning some-
thing that does not have any component part. In other
words, the object is indivisible into smaller components,
or parts. We have already learned about the interior of an
atom and know that there is nothing “indivisible” about it.
An atom is actually made up of a number of smaller parti-
cles. In this chapter we shall deal with such particles, parti-
cles that are smaller than an atom.
